rated, the Maker of the world must have stored the ground with an endless variety of forms, arranged in orderly sequence, so as irresistibly to teach certain lessons to the human mind, and that then He wrote a few lines on a scrap of papyrus to intimate that the lessons were untrue, and that all the vast apparatus for teaching them meant nothing at all. cles for various purposes are attached to pled, is a belief that can only be held in the shell, upon the interior of which their most glaring defiance of scientific eviimpressions are left, long after the death dence. As a clever writer recently oband decay of the animal, so as to be found served, "There are some things which even in fossils of great antiquity. In the you cannot really believe unless all your Lower Silurian period was created Lin- neighbours keep you in countenance."* gula Lesueuri, besides a great many other This is one of them. The thing is credispecies of Lingula. Lesueuri perishes, ble on one condition, and on one condiand in the Devonian period a new form is tion alone, namely, that human reason created, remarkably like the old one, and and the facts of external nature have known among men as Lingula squami- been so ingeniously adapted to one anformis. Squamiformis comes to a bad other by the Author of both, that a man end, and the carboniferous era is ushered cannot honestly employ his reason in the in. "But here a wonder came to light." observation of nature without being Squamiformis reappears, or something so mocked and cheated, and impelled to belike it as to baffle the discriminating pow-lieve what is false. It comes, in short, ers of the very best conchologists. The to this, that, far up to where the Himasame thing happens with Lingula myti- layan summits smile proudly above the loides, another carboniferous species, clouds, far down to the deepest gloom which is repeated in the Permian age. that the miner's lamp has ever peneThese forms cease to exist, and Lingula Beanii is presented to us in the Fauna of the Oolite; and successively Lingula truncata in the lower Greensand, subovalis in the upper Greensand, Lingula tenuis in the Eocene London Clay, Dumortieri in the Coralline crag of the Pleiocene era. All these, and a great many more, presenting in many cases differences that can scarcely be called distinc- There is another hypothesis which tions, proved unsatisfactory to their Cre- needs to be disposed of. Everyone will ator and were ruthlessly abolished. But admit that since the beginning of the a Lingula the world must have. Creation creation, some species have died out and would be incomplete without a Lingula. become extinct. The cyrtoceras is no And, consequently, about twenty-four more. The trilobite is wanting. Drop a hours before the creation of Adam, Lin- tear over the ashes of the ichthyosaurus; gula anatina suddenly made its appear- we shall not see his like again. Never ance, and still flourishes in the shallow more shall archæopteryx macrura waggle waters of tropical seas. his flexible tail.† As thousands of speMr. Davidson, in his admirable mono- cies have disappeared from the living graph of the Brachiopoda, tells us that world, it has seemed reasonable to many not only Lingula, but also "Discina, Cra-persons to admit, what the evidence of nia, and Rhynconella, appear to have trav- geology very plainly declares, that while ersed the whole geological, vertical range; some species have been dying out, others they appear in the older Silurian depos- have from time to time been introduced. its, and with similar or but slight modifi- But the question is, how were they introcations in character, are still represented duced? And the popular answer to this in our seas by a limited number of spe- question, an answer upon which some cies." The supply of parallel facts is persons think that all religion depends, almost inexhaustible. Take any age of is, that they were introduced in each case the world you will: the fauna of that age, by original creation. As the extinction that is, the whole group of animals then of species is still going on, and yet the existing on the globe, is inextricably in- world seems to present as great a variety terwoven with the fauna of the age that as ever, the introduction of species, even precedes, and the fauna of the age that in the present day, is admitted as possifollows it. That at any recent date, or at ble or probable. And if the introduction any date whatever, from the Silurian pe- must take place by original creation, it riod to our own times, the earth has been has been well put by a distinguished man swept clean of its inhabitants and re-peo- of science, that any morning you might Pal. Soc. 1853. Fossil Brachiopoda of Great VOL. II. 83 Pall Mall Gazette, November 15, 1871. + Lyell's Elements of Geology, p. 394 find an elephant standing on your lawn, | cies, varieties, with their several subjust created. But such a thing no one orders, sub-genera, and sub-varieties, would believe possible, unless all his till you come to the division into individneighbours kept him in countenance. No uals, and the interesting question, far less one can listen to such an expectation easy to solve than to propose, What is without ridiculing its absurd improbabil- an individual? ity, although many calmly enough sup- The first sub-kingdom comprises five pose that there was once a day when not classes, in the following order - mamonly the elephant suddenly made its as- mals, birds, reptiles, amphibia, and fishes. tonished and astonishing appearance, but The second sub-kingdom comprises — when every other creature that breathes what shall we say? We cannot tell what made its appearance in like manner. It to say until we know which is the second has been argued that new species may in sub-kingdom. By affinity of structure fact be introduced into the world from the Mollusca come nearest to the Vertetime to time suddenly, and by original brates, but the sagacious ant and brave creation, but that these occurrences, industrious bee seem to plead for the either accidentally, because they are so claims of the Arthropoda as far superior rare, or through the purposely secret to those of "oysters and so forth." It working of the Creator, taking place in appears that whatever characters of imocean depths or deserts where no men portance we choose upon which to base abide, have ever escaped the gaze of our classification, confusion invariably human curiosity. All other suppositions arises in some quarter or another from on the question have some sanction in conflicting claims. This appears in aranalogy, in observation, or in the reputed ranging even the classes of the verteauthority of Scripture. This last suppo- brates. The mammals take an indisputsition has none of these sanctions. Its able precedence, because man is a mamchief and only merit is that there is no direct way of testing the truth of it. It gives a mean and inconsistent idea of the Creator, as planting in men's breasts a spirit of enquiry, and then dodging them like a Will-o'-the-wisp, in their eager but necessarily fruitless pursuit. mal. But, not to speak of birds, many reptiles surpass many mammals in size, strength, and beauty, in adaptation of structure to a great variety of circumstances, and even in intelligence. Man himself is prone to claim an unlimited superiority over all other animals by The animal kingdom has been divided virtue of his reason; and because of this by authors of repute into seven sub-king- possession, which he often fancies to be doms. The lowest place is occupied by exclusively his own, he disdains the nothe Protozoa, to which sponges and infu- tion of an origin, however remote, from sorial animals belong; the highest is as- any creature unlike, or unequal to the signed by common consent to the Verte- present magnificence of humanity. He brata, comprising in their ranks sprats would do well to consider the recent date and men, baboons and skylarks, the cobra of his supremacy, and how far from uniand the frog. Between these two ex-versal still it remains. Measured by the tremes must be ranged the other five subkingdoms. The relative rank of these is less easy to determine. They are by name- the Mollusca, among which are found the oyster and the sea-squirt; the Arthropoda, comprehending butterflies, spiders, and crabs; the Vermes, or worms; the Echinodermata, containing the sea-urchin and the star-fish; and, lastly the Coelenterata, lowest of the five in organization, but comprehending corals and corallines, which the higher divisions cannot surpass, if even they can rival them, in beauty. For purposes of classification these seven sub-kingdoms are again sub-divided into classes, orders, families, genera, spe • Forms of Animal Life. By G. Rolleston, D.M., F.R.S. Introduction, p. xxvi. general estimate of man's unbounded lordship, the tribute which is annually paid in India to poisonous snakes and ravening tigers seems rather a large one. Of parasites unwillingly entertained in the very throne of reason, the brain itself, it would be unpleasant to speak more particularly; but why, I wonder, if we are so indisputably supreme, do we not abolish rats and earwigs? It would be interesting to know whether more sharks are slain by men or more men slain by sharks in the course of a year. Our superiority looks rather small when examined in detail. The eagle and the lynx have keener sight, the hound an acuter sense of smell. We cry in vain for the wings of a dove. We tax our ingenuity to build ocean-traversing steamers with high-pressure engines, and when these vehicles put forth their best speed little birds fly easily round down to our own times, husbands and them. Hundreds of animals can mock wives, fathers and children, have been the efforts of the swiftest human pursuer. The elephant and many other creatures surpass us in size and strength, the cat and others in agility. In love we are less constant than the pigeon. In war, how noble a picture we present! how lofty an example we set before the hawk and the tiger of mild good faith, serene benevolence, abstemious relf-restraint, and tender pity for our fellow-creatures! Of personal beauty it is needless to speak; on that point one half of the human race, negresses and Esquimaux squaws included, must of course be supreme, in spite of all the gazelles, and zoophytes, and peacocks, and birds-of-paradise in the world. A remark has been made that "if man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought," as many naturalists have done," of founding a separate order for his own reception."* It is retorted that man establishes his right to the exclusive position by exclusively possessing the power to classify. In Esop's fables a man debates this very question with a lion, and points out that in all pictures of contests between them, the lion is vanquished and the man prevails; to which the king of the forest makes reply, that if lions were the painters, men would be represented as the victims, and with much more fidelity to the facts of the case. It is indeed, not easy to see how the facts of the case can be in any way altered by the circumstance that men can paint and lions cannot. Men can classify; so, in a minor degree, can other animals. Dogs can distinguish strangers and acquaintances, well-dressed persons from persons in rags; the canine species from all other species. They cannot carry their classifications far, not from want of memory and intelligence, but from want of a well-devised language and printed books. Men can classify, but can they classify correctly? We are all agreed that the earth and the human race upon it are at least five or six thousand years old; and yet within the last hundred and twenty years parts of the very same structure, the so-called medusæ of the hydroid Zoophytes, and the stationary polypes from which the medusæ come, were classified, not in two different species or genera merely, but in two different classes. Among the fishes, among the crustaceans, *Descent of Man. Darwin. Vol. i. p. 191. separated and assigned to different groups and genera. We say proudly that man is his own classifier; but which man, if you please? Let the most intel- ⚫ ligent of my candid readers answer for themselves how much they have had to do with the classification of the animal kingdom. The best naturalists are still disputing whether men, the bimana, should be an order by themselves, or ranged alongside of the quadrumana as a section of the order Primates. The majority of mankind, even in these days of enlightenment, are content to follow, on one side or the other, the few leaders of opinion. In regard to facts discovered and arguments founded upon the discoveries, most of us are but too happy if we can do a little gleaning after the reapers, a little picking up of crumbs from beneath the tables of the rich. When we say "most of us," when we speak of "the majority of mankind," we refer only to those who give the subject a thought, for, compared with the whole mass of human beings on the globe, it is pretty certain that those who think or know anything about the classification of the animal kingdom are only a handful. The grasp of the subject obtained by a few industrious students, and the progress made in it by men of exceptional genius, are both of them largely due to the accumulation of experience and diffusion of knowledge made possible by the invention of printing. Printing itself was man's invention; but surely an animal cannot be transferred from one order to another by means of an invention. The art of printing, like many other contrivances evolved from the human mind, quite consistently with the law of natural selection though not precisely by that law, confirmed and carried forward man's general superiority over the other animals. In the same way tigers confirmed their general superiority over Indian villages when they invented the plan of hunting in couples, so that while one is being driven off by the wretched men at one end of the village, its companion carries off the still more wretched babies at the other. One thing in mental development is to be noticed, that the improvement is not transmitted only, perhaps we should add, not chiefly, by inheritance in the direct line of its first possessor. A mind exalted and refined becomes, as it were, the food and sustenance of other minds, kingdom for ingenuity and perseverance? Insects are not vertebrates. Among the vertebrata themselves, why can the parrot imitate articulate language, while the clever faithful dog can only whine and bark? Why is man, the highest of the highest class, inferior to the gudgeon in swimming, to the rabbit in running, to the squirrel in climbing, to the flea in jumping, to the snake in wriggling, and unable to fly at all ? whereby they also are refined and exalted, | Why do insects rank so high in the animal so that the refinement and exaltation are in the end transmitted, not through one only, but through many channels of inheritance. When we say that such and 'such a man was in advance of his time, we mean that other minds had not at that epoch so far beneficially varied as to be even capable of receiving the better food which he had become capable of supplying. Thus it is that with the mind as with the body, nature cannot, and obviously does not, select the absolute best; In entering now upon a more detailed but only the best under the circumstances. enquiry into the gradations observable It was long a favourite explanation of among the forms of organic life, it will the similarities between animals in some be convenient to begin with the lowest, respects extremely unlike, that they had the simplest, and most remote from ourall been created upon the same general selves. Many persons think it incontype. That sounds very philosophical ceivable that a sponge and a man could and satisfactory; let us examine it a lit- have had a common origin, however far tle. The vertebrate type contains mam- back that origin might be placed. Let such mals, birds, reptiles, amphibia and fishes. persons imagine themselves, if they can, Here we have grouped together men, brought suddenly face to face with the monkeys, and whales, the eagle, the os- various specimens of humanity under its trich, and the apteryx, the crocodile, tor- various conditions. They would see a toise, and adder, the frog and the axolotl, little pink baby and a great black-bearded the sturgeon, the flounder, and the lance- man, the fair Saxon beauty, and the swarth let. By the theory we have mentioned, she-savage too hideous to describe, the the Creator is regarded as an artist hav- lady in court-dress and the Indian in his ing an idea in his mind which he chose war-paint, the stripling in his jacket and to work out in various ways, just as an the aged councillor in his flowing robe; architect might employ Gothic architec- there would be "the heathen Chinee,” ture in building a palace or a hovel, a and the Turk, and the Swiss peasant-girl, church or a linendraper's shop. It would soldiers and sailors, blacksmiths and bakbe a strange vagary in a human artist, ers, boys bathing and climbing trees, bawhen rearing a grand cathedral, to build bies in long clothes, and babies in short by its side a beer-shop in the very same clothes, lawyers pleading in wigs and style, but hideously caricatured; or, håv-gowns, coal-miners burrowing undering on one day designed a vile grotesque ground, tailors sitting cross-legged, and tenement, on the next day to choose that a thousand other varieties, in age, cospattern, of all others, for the noblest of tume, complexion, tools and occupations. his works. Yet this is what the Divine In grades and diversities of intellect there artist is charged with having done in re- would be, besides the idiot and the magard to man and the baboon. With in- niac, the infant unable to speak or to finite variety at His command He is sup- reason, the booby school-boy, the man of posed to have employed one idea for a common sense, the genius without it, the thousand different purposes now and girl sweetly illogical, the prudent dame. then, as in the lancelet, almost losing In the manner of feeding, how great a sight of it altogether; at other times car- variety would appear among these anirying it a little too far, as in giving man mals! Some would be seen parasitical at the rudiment of a useless tail; just as if the breast, others dipping their fingers in man could not have been a vertebrate common in the dish, some conveying food without that rudiment. Why should a type, an abstract idea, an ideal plan, or whatever else you are pleased to call it, have been worked out into useless details? And if creation according to ideal types cannot explain these rudimentary structures, what can it explain? Why is the eye of a cuttle-fish so like the eye of a man? You cannot answer that it is "because the cuttle-fish is a vertebrate." to their mouths with chop-sticks, others delicately handling silver forks and the best Sheffield cutlery. In weapons of war the differences would be found still more numerous, intricate and surprising, from chips of flint and stakes hardened in the fire up to the very latest refinements of civilized humanity. To complete the parallel, along with the other representative persons there should be shown the faces and costumes of past ages as well as of the present, and the mimicry of both in the stage-player and the masquerader. At the first view of all this medley of animals some so sweet in tone, so noble in aspect, so wise in action, others so unlovely in all things, or so mean and trivial, how difficult would it be for an intelligent being, previously unacquainted with animal nature and the nature of man, to conceive or believe that all these, in spite of appearances, were of one species, of one common origin and descent! Yet most of my readers would find it difficult to believe the reverse, because they do know something of the nature of man, they are not puzzled by the thin disguises of costume, they understand something of the development of arts, of the progress of fashions, they know the gradations through which the helpless and speechless infant may be elevated into the hero and the orator. When an equally intimate knowledge of all animated nature has become common among men, one may be permitted at least to anticipate that the mention of man's affinity to "oysters and so forth," will be thought less witty as a joke than heretofore, and the joke less forcible as an argument. When we look at the beginnings of life, we find none of that enormous disparity between living creatures which confronts us in the later stages of growth and development. "All mammals," says De Quatrefages, "and even man himself, as well as birds and reptiles, proceed from actual eggs." "*"Up to a certain point," Professor Owen tells us, "the vertebrate germ resembles in form, structure, and behaviour, the infusorial monad and the germ-stage of invertebrates." † And again De Quatrefages says, "All vegetable and animal germs, seeds, buds, bulbs, and eggs, have their origin in a few granules, scarcely visible under the highest magnifying power or even in a single vesicle, smaller than the point of the finest needle. Thus commence alike the elephant and the oak, the moss and the earth-worm, and such is really the first appearance of what at a later period, will become a man." Nay, more ignominious still, "all vertebrates," says Owen, § "during more or less of their developmental lifeperiod, float in a liquid of similar specific * Metamorphoses of Man and the Lower Animals, ch. ii. ch. ii. Anatomy of Vertebrates, vol. i. p. 2. Metamorphoses of Man and the Lower Animals, Anatomy of Vertebrates, vol. i. p. 4. gravity to themselves." Henceforth, therefore, be a little more respectful to sponges and gregarines, considering their likeness to your former selves. Be pleased to remember, that whatever may have been the origin of the first man and the first woman, the origin of every one of you is perfectly well known; for notwithstanding the many virtues and graces you now can boast of, the most muscular Christian among you could once have passed easily through the eye of a needle, was once a little floating parasitic animal. The sponges and gregarines just mentioned belong to the Protozoa or lowest forms of animal life. A vast branch of the present subject, relating to the forms of vegetable life, must be dismissed for this time with only a passing reference. So difficult to distinguish are the confines of the two kingdoms, the animal and the vegetable, that a proposal has been made to establish a sort of neutral ground or third intermediate kingdom, the Regnum Protisticum of Haeckel. The necessity for this is disallowed by Dr. Carpenter and Professor Rolleston and by most other naturalists. But it is interesting to observe that in discriminating the two acknowledged kingdoms, we are in the last resort driven back upon a single character, not irritability, or contractibility, or locomotion, or circulation of absorbed and assimilated nutritive matters, for all these "phenomena universal in the animal" are "occasionally observable in the vegetable kingdom;" not the secretion of chlorophyll, and of cellulose, and the power of regenerating an entire compound organism from a more or less fragmentary portion, for all these properties almost universal among vegetables, are also "occasionally noticeable among animals.” * The nature of the food they are respectively capable of assimilating, constitutes the only ultimate line of demarcation between the two great divisions of physical life. † And in spite of this, Professor Rolleston, in his valuable work on The Forms of Animal Life, declares that "there are organisms which, at one period of their life, exhibit an aggregate of phenomena such as to justify us in speaking of them as animals, whilst at another they appear to be as distinctly vegetable." ‡ 66 Have you no brains?" is a question we sometimes put to those who disagree understand our explanations. We imply with us in opinion, or who do not readily Rolleston, Forms of Animal Life, p. clxiii. † Carpenter, The Microscope, p. 240, § 180. Rolleston, Op. cit., p. clxiii. |