Denaturalization

“ The law [191] of restoration would recover and right the stunned fish laid on its side; the law of reproduction would give limbs to the offspring of the mutilated saurian. We have evidence, in the extremeness of the degradation in these cases, that it cannot be a degradation hereditarily derived from accident. Nature is, we find, active, not in perpetuating the accidental wooden legs and green patches of ancestors in their descendants, but in restoring to the offspring the true limbs and eyes which the parents have lost. ”

“ What indeed would become of all the good things of the earth, what would become of the useful animals, and indeed of man himself, if each individual in these years of excess was to leave its quotum of offspring? This, however, does not happen, for destruction and sterility follow closely upon excessive fecundity, and, independently of the contagion which follows inevitably upon [Pg 126] overcrowding, each species has its own special sources of death and destruction, which are of themselves sufficient to compensate for excess in any past generation. ”

“ Born to destroy those beings which are subordinate, we should exhaust Nature if she were not exhaustless, and by a fertility superior to our depredations, renovates the destruction we continually make. But it is so ordained that death should contribute to life, and that reproduction should spring from destruction. However great, therefore, may be the waste made by man and carnivorous animals, the total quantity of living matter is never diminished, and if they hasten deaths they are also the cause of new births being produced. ”

“ The honest sense and feeling of the judge were evidently struggling with ecclesiastical law and usage, but he came to the conclusion that no mode of burial could be permitted which would prolong the natural decay of the body, or needlessly preserve its identity; that the lapse of a single generation is practically sufficient for mingling human remains with the earth, and destroying their identity; that, the dead having no legal right to crowd the living, each buried generation must give way to its successor ”

“ It is forgotten that to have valid evidence of non-inheritance of mutilations, it is requisite that both parents shall have undergone mutilation, and that this does not often happen. If they have not, then, assuming the inheritableness of mutilations, there would, leaving out other causes, be an equal tendency to appearance and non-appearance of the mutilation in offspring. But there is another cause—the tendency to reversion, which ever works in the direction of cancelling individual characters by the return to ancestral characters. ”

“ The only condition upon which the ovum may remain in the womb is by possessing life. As soon as it becomes dead it is rejected and cast out. If impregnated, while life continues in it, during its period of development, if nature is not interfered with, it is retained and nourished because it has life. The facts are simple enough: the germ is either dead or alive. If dead, nature casts it out; if alive, nature retains it. If nature retains it, and it is destroyed or removed by artificial means, the person or persons who produce such a result are guilty of murder. ”

“ Consequently, also, natural selection would speedily see to it that all sexually-propagating species should become deprived of the aboriginal endowment of immortality, with the result that death is now universal among all the individuals of such species—that is to say, among all the metazoa and metaphyta. Nevertheless, it is to be remembered that this destiny extends only to the parts of the individual other than the contents of those specialized cells which constitute the reproductive elements. ”

“ In most cases, after the course of nature had thoroughly removed all that could decay, there could be no objection to the disinterment of the skeleton. Cremation would now be a comparatively cheap method of preserving the remains from any treatment which might be held to be indecorous, and the passage of time would ordinarily have removed all occasion for the natural feeling which makes us shrink from doing any violence to a recent corpse. The earth used for the interments might, of course, be thoroughly heated at long intervals, to destroy any accumulation in it of organic products ”

“ Such were the Motives and Considerations that prompted me to endeavour to wrest, from the Jaws of Scandal and Reproach, poor human Nature, which has, from Time to Time, suffered great Disgrace, and many of whose innocent Children have been punished, and even put to Death, for having been reputed Hermaphrodites; Ignorance of the Fabrick of the Body has been the first great Occasion of those Evils, destroying Evils, which exist not only amongst the most ignorant Americans, but also amongst the Litterati themselves in other Parts of the World. ”

“ And if the evidence in favour of inherited mutilations breaks down, as I believe it does, this does not show that more normal modifications such as those with which we are familiar, as occurring in the course of individual life, are not capable of transmission. ”

“ After explaining the process of animal decomposition, and describing the various modes of disposing of the dead between which it is necessary to choose, the writer went on to insist that our present mode of burial is certainly injurious to health either now or in the future, and constitutes in reality a social sin of no small magnitude. A curious aspect of this question was brought to light by the mention of the large annual importation of bones for manuring the soil, while we bury a vast quantity of human bones annually, too deep in the earth to be useful agriculturally. ”

“ With respect to mutilations, it is certain that a part may be removed or injured during many generations, and no inherited result follow; and this is an apparent objection to the hypothesis which will occur to every one. ”

“ But, when so reduced, the rudiment might be inconvenient or even hurtful, and then natural selection would aid in its complete abortion; in other words, the abortion of the part would be useful, and would therefore be subject to the law of survival of the fittest. ”

“ Consequently, in all sexually-reproducing or multicellular organisms, natural selection set to work to reduce the term of individual lifetimes within the narrowest limits that in the case of each species were compatible with the procreation and the rearing of progeny. Nevertheless, in all these sexually-reproducing organisms the primitive endowment of immortality has been retained with respect to their germ-plasm, which has thus been continuous, through numberless generations of perishing organisms, from the first origin of sexual reproduction till the present time. ”

“ It is permitted to allow them to die; but from the moment of conception a new individual has been formed—a new living human individual, even though it only consists of a single cell, product of the union of the parental germ-cells: and we shall not be safe unless we regard this being as sacred and its destruction—except in order to save the life of the mother—as murder, even at this as at any later stage. ”

“ From this follows, on the one hand, the necessity of reproduction, and, on the other, the utility of death. Worn-out individuals are not only valueless to the species, but they are even harmful, for they take the place of those which are sound. Hence by the operation of natural selection, the life of our hypothetically immortal individual would be shortened by the amount which was useless to the species. ”

“ They must propagate their respective species; an absolute necessity which proves the wisdom of the Creator, since without reproduction all would, be annihilated—by the constant law of degradation, decay and death. ”

“ If in these cases the reversion is brought about by a change in the conditions of life, we may perhaps suppose that the magnitude of this change would determine the degree of fertility, and the preservation of the reversion form. Still more, however, would the fertility be influenced by the extent of the morphological difference resulting from the reversion. We know that the blending of very different constitutions (e.g. the crossing of different species) produces sterility. Something similar results from the sudden reversion to a stage of development widely different in its whole structure. ”

“ In considering the ways in which we can mitigate the evils of our rule over organic nature, we at once see that our aim should be to preserve all the varieties of living creatures from destruction, provided they are not distinctly harmful to man, and this with the intention of keeping for our successors in the inheritance all that can in any way afford a foundation for further experiments in domestication, materials for learned inquiries, or pleasure in contemplation. ”

“ With domesticated productions, although their organs sometimes become rudimentary through abortion, we have no reason to suppose that this has ever followed solely from disuse. With natural species, on the contrary, many organs appear to have been rendered rudimentary through disuse, aided by the principle of the economy of growth together with intercrossing. Complete abortion can be accounted for only by the hypothesis given in the last chapter, namely, the final destruction of the germs or gemmules of useless parts. ”

“ Various animals and plants become sterile when domesticated or supplied with too much nourishment. The native Tasmanians have already become extinct from sterility caused by greatly changed diet and habits. If, as Mr. Spencer teaches, continued culture and brain-work will in time produce lessened fertility or comparative sterility, we may yet have to be careful that intellectual development does not become a species of suicide, and that the culture of the race does not mean its extinction—or at least the extinction of those most susceptible of culture. ”

“ During the three centuries which succeeded, there was rather a warming into unnatural life of the mighty corpse, than the birth of a new organism, capable of healthy existence and unlimited reproduction. ”

“ The laws concerning defilement through eating unclean animals, or through contact with those that had died a natural death, are followed by rules relating to defilements proceeding from the human body, in consequence of which persons contaminated by them were excluded for a longer or shorter period from the fellowship of the sanctuary, and sometimes even from intercourse with their fellow-countrymen, and which had to be removed by washing, by significant lustrations, and by expiatory sacrifices. ”

“ With respect to the inheritance of structures mutilated by injuries or altered by disease it is difficult to come to any definite conclusion. In some cases mutilations have been practised for a vast number of generations without any inherited result. ”

“ If he is to be understood as referring to a case of complete severance of any part of an embryo before birth, it has not been demonstrated that such a severance has been followed by a successful effort of Nature to replace the severed part; and it is difficult to understand how there could be such an amputation during embryonic life without destroying the life of the embryo; or, if the severed part were one of the extremities, how there could be a new extremity formed. In such a case, if life continued and birth were to take place, the animal must be born in an imperfect state. ”

“ If these people knew even the A.B.C. of biology, they would know that millions of those elements are allowed to perish by Nature for a definite purpose—namely, to make procreation more certain. It is in order that the one may achieve the desired end that it is reinforced by millions of others. Moreover, although millions of deaths in the world occur every year from natural causes, it would nevertheless, I fear, be a crime if I were to cause one more death by murdering a birth controller. ”

“ But whether we can discover the true explanation or not, inherited mutilations can hardly be accounted for as the result of a general tendency to inherit acquired modifications. How could a factor which seems to be totally inoperative in cases of ordinary mutilation, and only infinitesimally operative in transmitting the normal effects of use and disuse, suddenly become so powerful as to completely overthrow atavism, and its own tendency to transmit the non-mutilated type of one of the parents and of the non-mutilated type presented by the injured parent in earlier life? ”

“ They, for instance of the contrary, who, by wilfully opposing the elevation of womanhood upon earth, have done what in them lies to mar the rehabilitation of the spiritual hermaphrodite sundered by the Fall—such, it is clear, have forfeited for the time their birthright of redemption; their portion is the second death, the degradation below humanity, in order that they may have a chance to do better when eventually they reach it again through the varieties and degrees of animal transformation which may be necessary in each case. ”

“ It has been supposed by some that where the beginnings of life are destroyed before the period of quickening, no crime is committed. This is a great mistake. From the moment that the spermatozoön penetrates the ovum and unites with it, life is present, and the destruction of that life is murder. ”

“ We noted above that it is to death, a necessity much hated, much maligned, that we owe the possibility of our own birth and standing-room on the face of the globe; but the theory of Natural Selection makes it further clear that the causes of death which we most dread and think evil of—war and famine and pestilence—are tending continually to improve the races of living creatures. ”

“ If we consider the introduction of natural death in connection with the foregoing statements, we may imagine the process as taking place in such a way that,—with the differentiation of Heteroplastids from Homoplastids, and the appearance of division of labour among the homogeneous cell-colonies,—natural selection not only operated upon the physiological peculiarities of feeding, moving, feeling, or reproduction, but also upon the duration of the life of single cells. ”