Sir John William Dawson

“ Even that early post-glacial age in which primitive man seems first to have spread himself over our continents was one richer both in animal and plant life than the present. The geographical changes which closed this period and inaugurated the modern era seem to have reduced not only the area of the continents but the variety of land life in a very remarkable manner. Thus our last lesson from the genesis and migrations of plants is the humbling one that the present world is by no means the best possible in so far as richness of vegetable and animal life is concerned. ”

“ While the huge ribs of mother earth that project into mountain summits, and the grand and majestic movement of the creative processes by which they have been formed, speak to us of the majesty of Him to whom the sea belongs, and whose hand formed the dry land, the continuance of these little plants preaches the same lessons of humble faith in the Divine promises and laws, which our Lord drew from the lilies of the field. ”

“ The old rocks and the ancient lines of folding and the perished forms of life are not merely a scaffolding set up to be thrown down, but the foundation stones of a great and symmetrical structure. Is it yet completed? Who can tell? The earth may still be young, and infinite ages of a better history may lie before it. ”

“ If we imagine a world altogether destitute of life, we still might have geological formations in progress. Not only would volcanoes belch forth their liquid lavas and their stones and ashes, but the waves and currents of the ocean and the rains and streams on the land, with the ceaseless decomposing action of the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, would be piling up mud, sand, and pebbles in the sea. There might even be some formation of limestone taking place where springs charged with bicarbonate of lime were oozing out on the land or the bottom of the waters. ”

“ It is the true continuity, which includes and binds together all other continuity.
It is here that natural science meets with theology, not as an antagonist, but as a friend and ally in its time of greatest need; and I must here record my belief that neither men of science nor theologians have a right to separate what God in Holy Scripture has joined together, or to build up a wall between nature and religion, and write upon it, "no thoroughfare." The science that does this must be impotent to explain nature, and without hold on the higher sentiments of man. ”

“ It seems almost ridiculous thus to connect the persistence of the form of a little plant with the subsidence and elevation of whole continents, and the lapse of enormous periods of time. Yet the Power which preserves unchanged from generation to generation the humblest animal or plant, is the same with that which causes the permanence of the great laws of physical nature, and the continued revolutions of the earth and all its companion spheres. ”

“ At this time, somewhere in the warm temperate zone, in an oasis or island of fertility, appeared a new thing on the earth, a man and woman walking erect in the forest glades, bathing in the waters, gathering and tasting every edible fruit, watching with curious and inquiring eyes the various animals around them, and giving them names which might eventually serve not merely to designate their kinds, but to express actions and emotions as well. ”

“ We cannot but feel some regret that the grand old Palæocosmic race was destined to be swept away by the flood, but it was no doubt better for the world that it should be replaced by a more refined if feebler race. When we see how this has, in some of its forms, reverted to the old type, and emulated, if not surpassed it in filling the earth with violence, we may, perhaps, congratulate ourselves on the extinction of the giant races of the olden time. ”

“ I say, for a time, because life is, in the visible universe, as at present constituted, but a temporary exception, introduced from that unseen world where it is no longer the exception but the eternal rule. In a still higher sense, then, than that in which matter and force testify to a Creator, organization and life, whether in the plant, the animal, or man, bear the same testimony, and exist as outposts put forth in the succession of ages from that higher heaven that surrounds the visible universe. ”

“ Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin, was the first science to establish on a basis of observed facts the necessity of a beginning and end of the world. But even physical science now teaches us that the visible universe is a vast machine for the dissipation of energy; that the processes going on in it must have had a beginning in time, and that all things tend to a final and helpless equilibrium. This necessity implies an unseen power, an invisible universe, in which the visible universe must have originated, and to which its energy is ever returning. ”

“ Lawrence plain, on the beautiful valleys of New England, and on the rice fields of the sunny south. We are reminded of the brotherhood of man, which overleaps all artificial boundaries, and should cause us to pray that throughout their whole extent these hills may rise amidst a happy, a free, and a God-fearing people.
Our Alpine plants have still higher lessons to teach. They are fitting emblems of that little flock, scattered everywhere, yet one in heart, and in all lands having their true citizenship in heaven. ”

“ Given a system of nature destitute of any being higher than the instinctive animal, and introduce into it a free rational agent, and you have at once an element of instability. So long as his free thought and purpose continue in harmony with the arrangements of his environment, so long all will be harmonious; but the very hypothesis of freedom implies that he can act otherwise, and so perfect is the equilibrium of existing things, that one wrong or unwise action may unsettle the nice balance, and set in operation trains of causes and effects producing continued and ever-increasing disturbance. ”

“ In mercy to humanity, this state of things was terminated by a great physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the continents—that Post-glacial flood, which must have swept away the greater part of men, and many species of great beasts, and left only a few survivors to re-people the world, just as the mammoth and other gigantic animals had to give place to smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes it seemed determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types should survive to re-people the world. ”

“ It is ours to take advantage of this precious time of quietude, and to extend the blessings of science and of our Christian civilisation from shore to shore, until there shall be no more sea, not in the sense of that final drying-up of old ocean to which some physicists look forward, but in the higher sense of its ceasing to be the emblem of unrest and disturbance, and the cause of isolation. ”

“ Let us look for a moment at the actual result of the development of these diverse styles of art, and at their effect on the culture of humanity as existing in nature. We may imagine a people who have wholly discarded nature in their art, and have devoted themselves to the monstrous and the grotesque. Such a people, so far as art is concerned, separates itself widely from nature and from the mind of the Creator, and its taste and possibly its morals sink to the level of the monsters it produces. Again, we may imagine a people in all respects following nature in a literal and servile manner. ”

“ The earth was once so clothed, in the time when vegetable life alone existed, and there were no animals to prey upon it, and when the earth was, like the world you now look upon, a paradise of plants; for all things in nature are at first in their best estate. This vegetation is known to you on the earth only by the Carbon and Graphite buried in your oldest rocks. ”

“ Those who think to build a philosophy and even a religion on such data are mere dreamers, and have no scientific basis for their dogmas. They are as blind guides as our primæval Protozoon himself would be in matters whose real solution lies in the harmony of our own higher and immaterial nature with the Being who is the Author of all life—the Father "from whom every family in heaven and earth is named." ”

“ Even when it professes to admit the existence of a God, the evolutionist reasoning of our day contents itself altogether with the physical or visible universe, and leaves entirely out of sight the power of the unseen and spiritual, as if this were something with which science has nothing to do, but which belongs only to imagination or sentiment. ”

“ One is the remarkable fixity of the leading types of living beings in geological time. If, instead of framing, like Haeckel, fanciful phylogenies, we take the trouble, with Barrande and Gaudry, to trace the forms of life through the period of their existence, each along its own line, we shall be greatly struck with this, and especially with the continuous existence of many low types of life through vicissitudes of physical conditions of the most stupendous character, and over a lapse of time scarcely conceivable. ”

“ Thus it would appear that the Pacific is the great centre of earth-movement, while the Atlantic trench is the more potent regulator of temperature, and the ocean most likely to be severely affected in this respect by small changes of its neighbouring land. Last of all, an observer, such as I have supposed, would see that the oceans are the producers of moisture and the conveyors of heat to the northern regions of the world, and that in this respect and in the immense condensation and delivery of ice at its north end, the Atlantic is by far the more active, though the smaller of the two. ”

“ When we find in the glacial beds the leaves of trees still living in North America and Europe, and consider the vicissitudes of elevation and submergence of the land, and of Arctic and temperate climates which have occurred, we are struck with the persistence of the weak things of life, as compared with the changeableness of rocks and mountains. A superficial observer might think the fern or the moss of a granite hill a frail and temporary thing as compared with solid and apparently everlasting rock. ”

“ The history never can be absolutely complete. Practically, to us it is infinite. Yet every series of facts known may be complete in itself for certain purposes, however many gaps there may be in the story. Even if we cannot find a continuous series between the snails of the Coal formation or the sponges of the Quebec Group and their successors to-day, we can at least see that they are identical in plan and structure, and can note the differences of detail which fitted them for their places in the ancient or the modern world. ”

“ If we were to adopt some of the modern ideas of evolution, we might cut the Gordian knot by supposing that, as like causes produce like effects, these types of life have originated more than once in geological time, and need not be genetically connected with each other. But while evolutionists repudiate such an application of their doctrine, however natural and rational, it would seem that nature still more strongly repudiates it, and will not allow us to assume more than one origin for one species. Thus the great question of geographical distribution remains in all its force ”

“ I would merely say here that we should bear in mind that in this latter half of the Lower Laurentian, or if we so choose to style it, Middle Laurentian period, we have the conditions required for life in the sea and on the land; and since in other periods we know that life was always present when its conditions were present, it is not unreasonable to look for the earliest traces of life in this formation, in which we find, for the first time, the completion of those physical arrangements which make life, in such forms of it as exist in the sea, possible. ”

“ It will also be desirable to avoid, as far as possible, the use of the term "evolution," as this has recently been employed in so many senses, whether of development or causation, as to have become nearly useless for any scientific purpose; and that when I speak of creation of species, the term is to be understood not in the arbitrary sense forced on it by some modern writers, but as indicating the continuous introduction of new forms of life under definite laws, but by a power not emanating from within themselves, nor from the inanimate nature surrounding them. ”

“ In addition to this we know that the geographical arrangements of our continents were suited to the production of a great uniformity of climate. Taking the American continent as the simpler, we know that in this period there existed in the interior plateau between the rudimentary eastern and western mountains a great inland sea, so sheltered from the north that its waters contained hundreds of species of corals, growing with a luxuriance unsurpassed in the modern tropics. On the shores and islands of such a sea we do not wonder that there should have been tree-ferns and gigantic lycopods. ”

“ As the tide recedes flocks of sandpipers and crows follow it down, and leave an infinity of footprints, and even quadrupeds like the domestic hog go far out at low water in search of food. It is said that in some parts of the Bay the hogs are so assiduous in this pursuit that they even awake and go out on the flats in the night tide, and that they have so learned to dread the dangers of the flood, that when in the darkness they hear the dull sound of the approaching bore, they squeal with fear and rush madly for the shore. ”

“ In recent years the Challenger expedition and similar dredgings have informed us of still another continuity of deposition in the depths of the ocean. There, where no detritus from the land, or only a very little fine volcanic ash or pumice has ever reached, we have, going on from age to age, a deposit of the hard parts of abyssal animals and of those that swim in the open sea; so that if it were possible to bore or sink a shaft in some parts of the ocean, we should find not only a continuous bed, but a continuous series of pelagic life from the Laurentian to the present day. ”

“ Take, for instance, the early Devonian or Erian period, in which the magnificent flora of that age, the earliest certainly known to us, made its appearance. Imagine the whole interior plain of North America submerged, so that the continent is reduced to two strips on the east and west, connected by a belt of Laurentian land on the north. In the great mediterranean sea thus produced, the tepid water of the equatorial current was circulated, and it swarmed with corals, of which we know no less than 150 species, and with other forms of life appropriate to warm seas. ”

“ Further, we have no right here to overlook the fact that the conditions of the embryo are determined by those of a previous adult, and that no sooner does this hereditary potentiality produce a new adult animal, than the terrible external agencies of the physical world, in presence of which all life exists, begin to tell on the organism, and after a struggle of longer or shorter duration it succumbs to death, and its substance returns into inorganic nature, a law from which even the longer life of the species does not seem to exempt it. ”

“ In Eozoon we must discern not only a mass of jelly but a being endowed with that higher vital force which surpasses vegetable life, and also physical and chemical forces; and in this animal energy we must see an emanation from a Will higher than our own, ruling vitality itself; and this not merely to the end of constructing the skeleton of a Protozoon, but of elaborating all the wonderful developments of life that were to follow in succeeding ages, and with reference to which the production and growth of this creature were initial steps. ”

“ We labour in our investigation of this matter under the disadvantage that the modern period is evidently one of the times of pause in the creative work. Had our time been that of the early Tertiary or early Mesozoic, our views as to the question of origin of species might have been very different. It is a striking fact, in illustration of this, that since the glacial age no new species of mammal, except, possibly, man himself, can be proved to have originated on our continents, while a great number of large and conspicuous forms have disappeared. ”

“ Thus our dawn animal has positively no story to tell as to its own introduction or its transmutation into other forms of existence. It leaves the mystery of creation where it was, but in connection with the subsequent history of life we can learn from it a little as to the laws which have governed the succession of animals in geological time. First, we may learn that the plan of creation has been progressive, that there has been an advance from the few low and generalized types of the primæval ocean to the more numerous, higher, and more specialized types of more recent times. ”