Sir John William Dawson

“ 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.” ”

“ Should it be ultimately proved that species allied and representative, but distinct in origin, come into being simultaneously everywhere, we shall arrive at one of the laws of creation, and one probably connected with the gradual change of the physical conditions of the world.
A closely related truth is the periodicity of introduction of species. They come in by bursts or flood-tides at particular points of time, while these great life-waves are followed and preceded by times of ebb in which little that is new is being produced. ”

“ Perhaps the most comprehensive of these is that the links in the chain of life, or rather in its many chains, are not scattered and disunited things, but members of a great and complex plan; and that when we discern their combinations and their pattern, we find them not only orderly and symmetrical, but all tending to one point and bound to one central object, even the throne of the Eternal. ”

“ So far as yet known, the reign of reptiles was world-wide in its time; and the imagination is taxed to conceive of a state of things in which the seas swarmed with great reptiles on every coast, when the land was trodden by colossal reptilian bipeds and quadrupeds, in comparison with some of which our elephants are pygmies, and when the air was filled with the grotesque and formidable Pterodactyls. ”

“ Call the progress of life an evolution if you will; trace it back to primæval Protozoa, or to a congeries of atoms: still the truth remains that nothing can be evolved out of these primitive materials except what they originally contained. Now we find in the existence of man, and in the tendency of the scheme of nature towards his introduction, evidence that at least all that is involved in the reasoning and moral nature of man must have existed potentially before atoms began to shape themselves into crystals or into organic forms. ”

“ Even when it professes to admit the existence of a God, the evolutionist reasoning of our day limits itself practically to 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. ”

“ As the reptiles establish themselves on the land and in the waters, the Ganoids diminish, but the Sharks hold their own. At length the reign of reptiles is over, but the Ganoids, instead of resuming their pristine numbers, give place to the Teleosts, and become reduced to insignificance; while the Sharks, profiting by the decadence of the great marine reptiles, remain the tyrants of the seas. This history is strangely unlike a continuous evolution ”

“ They cannot perhaps be expected to take us back to the origin of living beings; but they also fail to explain why so vast numbers of highly organised species struggle into existence simultaneously in one age and disappear in another, why no continuous chain of succession in time can be found gradually blending species into each other, and why in the natural succession of things degradation under the influence of external conditions and final extinction seem to be laws of organic existence. ”

“ First, there is every reason to believe that the earth we inhabit was once a glowing, incandescent mass, condensing from a vaporous condition, and quite unfit for the abode of living beings, and which, even if in some previous state its materials had constituted the mass of an inhabited world, must have lost every trace of any living germ in the fervent heat to which it had been subjected. There must, therefore, have been in some way an absolute creation or origination of life and organisation. ”

“ As we have traced onward the succession of life, reference has been made here and there to the defects of those bold theories of descent with modification which are held forth in our time as the true bond of the links of the chain of life. ”

“ So much has this been the case that when recently a few physicists and naturalists have turned to this aspect of the subject, they have seemed to be teaching new and startling truths, though only reviving some of the oldest and most permanent ideas of our race. From the dawn of human thought it has been the conclusion alike of philosophers, theologians, and the common sense of mankind, that the seen can be explained only by reference to the unseen, and that any merely physical theory of the world is necessarily partial. ”

“ Nor is it impossible that some modern bivalves of the Brachiopod group may be scarcely modified descendants even of Palæozoic species.
Perhaps some of the most remarkable facts in connection with the permanence of species and varietal forms are those furnished by that magnificent flora which burst in all its majesty on the American continent in the Cretaceous period, and still survives among us even in some of its specific types, I say survives; for we have but a remnant of its forms living, and comparatively little that is new has probably been added since. ”

“ A third illustration of the partial character of these hypotheses may be taken from the use made of the theory deduced from modern physical discoveries, that life must be merely a product of the continuous operation of physical laws. The assumption, for it is nothing more, that the phenomena of life are produced merely by some arrangement of physical forces, even if it be admitted to be true, gives only a partial explanation of the possible origin of life. It does not account for the fact that life as a force or combination of forces is set in antagonism to all other forces. ”

“ And now I may be permitted to add that we should be thankful that it is given to us to deal with so great questions, and that in doing so deep humility, earnest seeking for truth, patient collection of all facts, self-denying abstinence from hasty generalisations, forbearance and generous estimation with regard to our fellow-labourers, and reliance on that Divine Spirit which has breathed into us our intelligent life, and is the source of all true wisdom, are the qualities which best become us. ”

“ But when we compare the development of an animal from an embryo cell with the progress of animals in time, though we have a curious analogy as to the steps of the process, the conditions and agents at work are known to be altogether dissimilar, and therefore we have no evidence whatever as to identity of cause, and our reasoning becomes at once the most transparent of fallacies. ”

“ Thus our knowledge of Epochs of Life, and indeed of the whole geological history of the earth, is based on the superposition of beds in the earth’s crust, and on the diversity of fossil remains in the successive beds so superimposed on each other ”

“ It seemed well fitted to express the connection and succession of forms of life, without implying their derivation from one another, while it reminds us that nature is not a fortuitously tangled skein, and that the links which connect man himself with the lowest and oldest creatures bind him also to the throne of the Eternal.
In the few years that have elapsed since the publication of the first edition of this work, great additions have been made to our knowledge of fossil animals and plants. ”

“ We shall name, for convenience, the parts of this Pleistocene revolution which include the great subsidence and glaciation, the Glacial Age, that extending from the re-elevation to the modern the Post-glacial.
The Glacial Age proved fatal to a large proportion of the land life of the previous periods. According to Professor Boyd Dawkins, out of fifty-three species known in Britain in the Post-glacial, only twelve are survivors of the Pliocene; and probably the proportions would not be greater in any part of the northern hemisphere. ”

“ Another example may be taken from that application of the doctrine of natural selection to explain the introduction of species in geological time which is so elaborately discussed by Sir C. Lyell in the last edition of his Principles of Geology. The great geologist evidently leans strongly to the theory, and claims for it the “highest degree of probability,” yet he perceives that there is a serious gap in it; since no modern fact has ever proved the origin of a new species by modification. ”

“ In them, as in dead matter, Almighty power is no doubt conditioned by law, yet they bear more distinctly upon them the impress of their Maker, and while all explanations of the physical universe which refuse to recognise its spiritual and unseen origin must necessarily be partial and in the end incomprehensible, this destiny falls more quickly and surely on the attempt to account for life and its succession on merely materialistic principles. ”

“ The Pteropods and the sponge are very similar to forms now living. The Trilobites are an extinct group, but closely allied to some modern Crustaceans. Had the primordial life begun with species altogether inscrutable and unexampled in succeeding ages, this would no doubt have been mysterious; but next to this is the mystery of the oldest forms of life being also among the newest. Whatever the origin of these creatures, they represent families which have endured till now in the struggle for existence without either elevation or degradation. ”

“ Thus in the whole of the great Palæozoic period, both in its fauna and flora, we have a continuity and similarity of a most marked character.
There is, indeed, nothing to preclude the supposition that many forms reckoned as species are really only race modifications. My own provisional conclusion, based on the study of Palæozoic plants, published many years ago,93 is that the general law will be found to be the existence of distinct specific types independent of each other, but liable in geological time to minor modifications, which have often been regarded as distinct species. ”

“ It must also appear evident that the original plan of nature, both in the animal and vegetable worlds, was too vast to be realised at one time on a globe so limited as ours, but had to be distributed in time as well as in space, thus realising the idea of time-worlds: successive æons in which, one after the other, the work of creation could rise to successive stages of perfection and completeness till it culminated in man. ”

“ Questions as to the origin and history of life are not at the present time answered by mere philosophical speculation and poetical imagining. Such solutions of these questions as science can profess to have obtained are based on vast accumulations of facts respecting the remains of animals and plants preserved in the rocky beds of the earth’s crust, which have been successively accumulated in the course of its long geological history. ”

“ The world we live in is thus not necessarily a finished world, and it is now marred by the sins of man. What it may be in the future, we can perhaps as little guess as an intelligence studying the Palæozoic world could have understood that of the present time. But it is a glorious truth to know that our Maker has revealed Himself to us also as a Saviour, and that as individuals we shall not perish, to be replaced by an improved species in the future, but that we ourselves, as sons of God, may enter into and possess the new earth and new heavens of future æons of the universe. ”

“ Nay, more than this is implied, for we do not know that man and what he has hitherto been and done constitute the ultimate perfection of nature, and we must suspect that something much more than what we see in man must be required for the origination of the chain of life. ”

“ In the oldest portion of the Cambrian series in Wales, Hicks has catalogued species of no less than seventeen genera, embracing Crustaceans, the representatives of our crabs and lobsters, bivalve and univalve shell-fishes of different types, worms, sea-stars, zoophytes, and sponges. If we could have walked on the shores of the old Cambrian sea, or cast our dredge or trawl into its depths, we should have found representatives of most of the humbler forms of sea life still extant,46 though of specific forms strange to us. ”

“ To the naturalist, vegetable life, with regard to its modern uses, is the great accumulator of pabulum for the sustenance of the higher forms of vital energy manifested in the animal. In the Palæozoic this consideration sinks in importance. In the Coal period we know few land animals, and these not vegetable feeders, with the exception of some insects, millipedes, and snails. But the Carboniferous forests did not live in vain, if their only use was to store up the light and heat of those old summers in the form of coal, and to remove the excess of carbonic acid from the atmosphere. ”

“ Farther, since the great waves of aquatic life roll in with each great subsidence of the land, a fact which coincides with their appearance in the limestones of the successive periods, it follows that it is not struggle for existence, but expansion under favourable circumstances and the opening up of new fields of migration that is favourable to the introduction of new species. ”

“ Unity and uniformity, within the limits imposed by progress and increasing complexity, can be affirmed of the whole process. From the dawn of life to the present time the great laws of physical nature which operate on animals and plants have been uniform. These stable laws have regulated the action of the outer world on organisms. The plans of structure of these organisms laid down at the first have been followed throughout. ”