Primitive streak

“ I have gone through many books without result, and in other cases my gains have often been small. It is only in quite recent times that attention has been paid with any great profit to this side of primitive life. Among the English [vii] authors Frazer has drawn up a list of ethnological questions (printed in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18, 1889, pp. 431 ff., and also separately) , paying due attention to time-reckoning, which has had a lasting and happy result, as can be seen especially in many papers in the JRAI of succeeding years. ”

“ A tiny streak shoots out from behind the blot—a solar prominence. A scientist tells us that "tiny streak" is 80,000 miles long! Blazing and glowing at a heat beyond human imagination. It is a real hell fire. ”

“ For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the [3] slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. ”

“ No doubt the numerous local disturbances above mentioned have frequently broken the chain of created beings; but a gradual progress from related to related forms, a continuous development from lower to more highly organised species, genera, orders, and classes, has from the beginning been the general and constant law of organic life. Universal destructions of existing forms, revolutions covering the whole surface of the earth with ruin, have most assuredly never occurred in the annals of our globe. ”

“ It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew. Slow? On the stage of Eternity the passing of races—the entrances and exits of Life—are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another with confusing rapidity.
Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those places where the forces of nature have been most malign. ”

“ The primitive man, ignorant of natural forces, dreaded their approach, hiding from the perils they threatened. As man learned to understand Nature's phenomena, he realized that though these may destroy life and cause great loss, they also bring relief. To the earnest student it must be apparent that the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in a political act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning. ”

“ The slowness of evolution, of human cultural progress, testifies to the effectiveness of that brake—material inertia—which so efficiently operates to retard dangerous velocities of progress. Thus does time itself cushion and distribute the otherwise lethal results of premature escape from the next-encompassing barriers to human action. ”

“ The earlier inquirers, as often as they encountered a break in the regular sequence of formations, connected it theoretically with a sudden and violent catastrophe, which had put an end to the regular course of events that had been going on uninterruptedly for ages, annihilating at the same time all or nearly all the organic beings which had previously flourished, after which, order being re-established, a new series of events was initiated. ”

“ If not by the human race, by its successor—whichever race or species, if such could happen, that mutated successfully enough to produce a plague resistant strain and then evolved a rational brain.
Civilizations rose and toppled in cycles, he knew. Sometime in the near future or even the far future, another civilization would emerge on Terra and another race would conquer the stars. ”

“ The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. ”

“ The whole scope of animated Nature, the evolution of animals, was suddenly arrested in that part of our hemisphere over which these gigantic convulsions spread, followed by the brief but sudden submersion of entire continents. Organic life had scarcely recovered from the violent shock, when a second, and perhaps severer blow assailed it. ”

“ If, in the very nature of things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore we are driven back upon a process ab aeterno with every stage of evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of the whole. ”

“ The false streak seems originally to dart out from the light, as described by Lipps, visibly growing in length for a certain distance, and then to be suddenly eclipsed or blotted out simultaneously in all its parts. ”

“ Can we say of anything that it exists when all passes away, when time, with the speed of a storm, carries all things onward,—and our transitory existence, hurried along by the torrent, is either swallowed up by the waves or dashed against the rocks? There is not a moment but preys upon you,—and upon all around you, not a moment in which you do not yourself become a destroyer. The most innocent walk deprives of life thousands of poor insects: one step destroys the fabric of the industrious ant, and converts a little world into chaos. ”

“ Then the stress of conditions relaxes—the great ice-sheet disappears—and again during a vast period he makes very little progress. The stress returns. The genial country is stripped and impoverished, and the reindeer and mammoth spread to the south of Europe. But once more the adversity has its use, and man, stimulated in his hunt for food, invigorated by the cold, driven into social life, advances to the culmination of the Old Stone Age. ”

“ The depression is Krocker Land. If profound its climate is temperate. Life, the remnants of its first evolutionary phases, may be there—but mark me!” The Professor positively dilated, everything in him enlarged as if his bounding heart sent fuller currents of blood to all its outposts; his eyes were refulgent; I thought they were an emerald green; his hair rose in the thrill of his vaticination and his mouth opened into a vast exclamatory rictus, in which flashed his big white incisors like diminutive tusks. “Mark me, there too will be found the last evolutionary phases of the human race!” ”

“ This disruption, in its effects on a species of non-gregarious habits, would result not only in the dispersal of its members, but in the destruction of what material progress in the accumulation of property might have accrued. As this would have included all germs of mechanical discovery, again doubtless due solely to the superior constructive faculties of the male, it is evident that advance in a race thus socially constituted was quite impossible. ”

“ Adaptation by divergence—for the most part by slow stages—is the movement of evolution. While occasional leaps or sudden changes occur in the process, they are by no means the rule. In most cases of “saltatory evolution,” the suddenness is in appearance only. It comes from our inability to trace the intermediate stages. When an epoch-making character is acquired, as the wings of a bird or the brain of man, the process of readjustment of other characters goes on with greatly increased rapidity. But this rapidity of evolution is along the same lines as the slower processes. ”

“ But it enables us to plot the line of human progress by points far enough apart to allow us to distinguish between minor and temporary oscillations and fluctuations and the law of the curve. The torch is passed from people to people and from continent to continent, but never falls or goes out. ”

“ There have very likely been many occasions where the changes in structure took place rapidly, in consequence of sudden variations in natural conditions. Such rapid changes in conditions necessarily exert a severe stress or strain on organisms, either destroying them or causing an equally rapid adaptation, physical or mental. In such instances it is likely that many species perish, the change demanded being too great; others escape by migration to better fitted localities; and others, more mobile or less affected by the change, survive through adaptive variations. ”

“ One also realised dimly a mysterious Cyclic Law of Change, seen not merely in inorganic matter but also in organised life and its highest manifestations. One saw how inertness passes into the climax of activity and how that climax is perilously near its antithetic decline. This basic change puzzles us by its seeming caprice not merely in our physical instruments but also in the cycle of individual life and death and in the great cycle of the life and death of nations. We fail to see things in their totality and we erect barriers that keep kindreds apart. ”

“ Some species and genera endure through several successive groups of strata; while others disappear, and new forms come into view, as we ascend. And thus, the change from one set of organic forms to another, as we advance in time, is made, not altogether by abrupt transitions, but in part continuously. The uniformitarian, in the case of organic, as in the case of mechanical change, obliterates or weakens the evidence of sudden and catastrophic leaps, by interposing intermediate steps, which involve, partly the phenomena of the preceding, and partly those of the subsequent condition. ”

“ Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life, instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy, stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. ”

“ But the historical evidence is conclusive as to the destructive changes occasioned by the agency of man upon the flanks of the Alps, the Apennines, the Pyrenees, and other mountain ranges in Central and Southern Europe, and the progress of physical deterioration has been so rapid that, in some localities, a single generation has witnessed the beginning and the end of the melancholy revolution. ”

“ Must we accept the theory of a long break caused by geological phenomena, and the temporary depopulation which was one of the consequences of these phenomena? Did the new era of civilization date from the arrival of foreign races, stronger and better fitted than those they succeeded for the struggle for existence? ”

“ Each race, after separation, shows evidence of arrested growth; and, finally, the intellect of the nation fossilizes and becomes stationary for an indefinite period, or until destroyed by being brought again in contact with the leading races in an advanced stage of civilization, precisely in the same way that the individuals composing these races, after propagating their species, stagnate, and ultimately decay, or, in a low state of savagery, are often destroyed by their own offspring. ”

“ In other words a more general fluidity is accomplished. We see, therefore, a second principle begin to emerge. Not only is fluidity fundamental to social change, but the degree of fluidity seems to vary directly as the shock and extent of the catastrophe.
There yet remains to notice the bearing of catastrophe upon social progress. The following words are quotable in this connection:
It is quite certain that the degree of progress of a people has a certain relation to the number of disturbances encountered, and the most progressive have had a more vicissitudinous life. ”

“ Further, there is a very practical reason for his looking with suspicion and not with confidence on social changes. It is only as the result of a long course of slow evolution that society has attained to a condition of fairly stable equilibrium. ”

“ Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study. ”

“ The significance of the time-reckoning of the primitive peoples for the history of chronology seems to have been only gradually grasped by the author in the course of his work, since it is not until after he has touched occasionally upon the question of primitive time-reckoning in the course of his account of the chronological systems of the Oriental peoples that he inserts the chapter in question between the latter and the chapters on the chronology of antiquity. ”

“ It is evident, however, that those periods of elevation, which have passed without leaving any trace behind them, deserve a no less careful consideration than the greater or less alternating periods of depression, of whose organic population we can form an approximate idea from the strata containing petrifactions. ”

“ Whenever anyone in our family became bolshie, my mother referred to it as “the Sullivan streak”. The Sullivans probably referred to it as “the Williams streak.” With growing understanding of the effects on our lives of our genetic heritage it is a sobering thought to realise how much those who are long gone continue to have an impact on both our physical and emotional lives. In this respect science confirms that we are truly at the mercy of our genes.
The Fox Glacier township is now a busy tourist centre attracting visitors from all over the world. ”