2. No less a man than David Friedrich Strauss, who, in 1872, wrote "The Old Faith and New," his last work, used Bathybius as a presumably triumphant keystone of the physiological portion of his argument against the belief in the supernatural. This deep-sea ooze he made the bridge between the inorganic and the organic. "At least two miracles or revelations," wrote Jean Paul Richter, face to face with the French Revolution, "remain for you uncontested in this age, which deadens sound with unreverberating materials. They resemble an Old and a New Testament, and are these,-the birth of finite being and the birth of life within the hard wood of matter. In one inexplicable every other is involved, and one miracle annihilates a whole philosophy." It is very noteworthy, that, according to Strauss's own final admission in 1872, miracle must be confessed to have occurred once at least at the introduction of life, unless some method of filling up the chasm between the dead and the living forms of matter can be found. Bathybius was to occupy this gap. Huxley," wrote Strauss, "has discovered the Bathybius, a shining heap of jelly on the sea-bottom; Häckel, what he has called the Moneres, structureless clots of an albuminous carbon, which, although inorganic in their constitution, yet are all capable of nutrition and accretion. By these the chasm may be said to be bridged, and the transition effected from the inorganic to the organic. As long as the contrast between inorganic and organic, lifeless and living nature, was understood as an absolute one, as long as the conception of a special vital force was retained, there was no possibility of spanning the chasm without the aid of a miracle."3 Ás devout believers in Bathybius, educated men-Strauss affirmed in the name of what he mistook for German culture-could no longer be Christians. Bathybius had expelled miracle. Thus in 1868 and 1873 Bathybius was the watchword of the acutest anti-supernaturalistic discussions, and was adopted as a victorious weapon by Strauss, when, with his dying hand, he was using his last opportunity to equip his philosophy with armour. Men have trembled before Strauss's negation of the supernatural. Bathybius was his chief support of that denial. Huxley called his discovery Bathybius Häckelii. Ernst Häckel, well knowing what stupendous issues were at stake, elaborately applauded the discovery. 3. Great_microscopists and physiologists, like Professor Lionel Beale and Dr. Carpenter, rejected Huxley's testimony on this matter of fact. Dr. Wallich, in 1869, in the "Monthly Microscopical Journal,” presented evidence that the deep-sea ooze has nothing in it to confirm Huxley's views. The ship "Challenger," engaged now in deep-sea soundings, has accumulated evidence of the same sort; and at present Bathybius is a scientific myth and a by-word of derision. Bathybius," says Professor Lionel Beale in his work on plasm" (London, 1874, pp. 110, 368, 371), which the "North British Review" well calls one of the most remarkable books of the age, 2 Levana, sect. 38. 1 The Old Faith and New, sect. 48. "Proto "instead of being a widely-extending sheet of living protoplasm, which grows at the expense of inorganic elements, is rather to be regarded as a complex mass of slime, with many foreign bodies and the debris of living organisms which have passed away. Numerous minute living forms are, however, still found upon it." At the meeting of the German Naturalists' Association at Hamburg, in September 1876, Bathybius was publicly interred. It was my fortune to converse for a while, lately, with Professor Dana of Yale College, when I put to him the question, "Does Bathybius bear the microscope ?" He replied, "You know that, in a late number of The American Journal of Science and Arts,' Huxley has withdrawn his adhesion to his theory about Bathybius." Thus the ship " Challenger" has challenged the assertion with which Strauss challenged the world; and Huxley himself has left Bathybius to take its place with other ghosts of not blessed memory in the history of hasty speculation. 4. Nevertheless, in his New York definition of the doctrine of evolution, Professor Huxley speaks of a "gelatinous mass, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all life." As, by his own confession, no such gelatinous mass has ever been observed, his popular assertion that our "knowledge" goes "so far" as to establish that this gelatinous mass not only exists, but is the foundation of all life, is contradictory of his published retraction of his theory before scholars. The observed Bathybius having turned out to be a myth, its place is now occupied by an inferential Bathybius. The chasm between the inorganic and the organic was not bridged by the results of actual observation; but it must yet be bridged, even if only with a guess and a recanted theory. This substitution of the inferential for the observed is unscientific. primary fault of Professor Huxley's latest definition of the basis of evolution is self-contradiction. A Huxley persists in his forced recantation in spite of all the alleged discoveries in the Bay of Biscay and the Adriatic. But the gelatinous mass, which, according to Huxley's New York Lectures, is the common foundation of all life, he defined. His words permit no doubt that he meant Bathybius and its associated forms of life, as Häckel does in similar language, and not protoplasm in the minute forms in which it exists in the living tissues of to-day. Huxley affirmed in New York, that, "if we traced back the animal and vegetable world, we should find, preceding what now exists, animals and plants not identical with them, but like them, only increasing their differences as we go back in time, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler, until finally we should arrive at the gelatinous mass, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all life. The tendency of science is to justify the speculation that that also could be traced farther back, perhaps to the general nebulous condition of matter."1 Very plainly, by this gelatinous mass, at which we should "arrive " 1 Tribune Pamphlet Report, p. 16. by a process of investigation carried backward to the first living organisms and to the nebulous condition of matter, Huxley does not mean protoplasm in minute forms in the veins of the nettle, and in the other living tissues of to-day, and in them constituting what his famous lecture of a few years ago called "the physical basis of life." But he affirmed that our "knowledge," and not merely our theory, goes so far" as to show that this gelatinous mass is "the foundation of all life." 66 In view of his recantation as to this sheet of living matter beneath the seas, this assertion is self-contradictory. Since no such gelatinous mass has ever been seen, the substitution of an inferential for an observed sheet of living slime enveloping the world is unscientific. With the argument of Huxley, that of Strauss takes its place among exploded and ludicrous errors. 5. It follows, also, from the facts now stated, that Professor Huxley's New York Lectures are defective in omitting the most essential part of their subject; that is, in failing to explain how evolution bridges the chasm between the inorganic and the organic, or the lifeless and the living forms of matter. 6. There have been and are at least three schools of evolutionists, -those who deny the Divine existence, those who ignore it, and those who affirm it; or the atheistic, the agnostic, and the theistic. Carl Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott belong to the atheistic school of evolutionists; Huxley and Tyndall and Spencer, to the agnostic; Dana, Gray, Owen, Dawson, Carpenter, Sir J. Herschell, Sir W Thomson, and, in the judgment of Professor Gray, Darwin himself, to the theistic. 7. Of the theistic form of the doctrine of evolution, there are theoretically three varieties: (1) That which limits the supernatural action in the origination of species to the creation of a few primordial cells; (2) That which makes Divine action in the origination of species chiefly indirect, or through the agency of natural causes, and yet sometimes direct, or through special creation; (3) That which makes God immanent in all natural law, and regards every result of cosmic forces as the outcome of present Divine action. 8. In the history of the discussion of evolution. the origin of species among plants and animals has been explained by at least seven distinct hypotheses: (1.) Self-elevation by appetency, or use and effort. That is the theory of Monboddo, Lamarck, and Cope. (2.) Modification by the surrounding condition of the medium. That is Geoffrey St. Hillaire, Quatrefages, Draper, and Spencer. (3.) Natural selection under the struggle for existence, with spontaneous variability, causing the survival of the fittest. That is Darwin and Häckel. (4.) Derivation by pre-ordained succession of organic forms under an innate tendency or internal force. That is Owen and Mivart. (5.) Evolution by unconscious intelligence. That is Morell, Laycock, and Murphy. (6.) Immanent action and direction of Divine power, working by the purposive collocation and adjustment of natural forces, acting without breaks; or the theory of creative evolution. That is Asa Gray, Baden Powell, and the Duke of Argyll. (7.) The same immanent Divine power collocating and adjusting natural forces, but with breaks of special intervention, and this notably in the case of man. That is Dana, and Darwin's great codiscoverer of evolution, Alfred Wallace.1 What Huxley calls the Miltonic theory of creation, he did well not to call the biblical; for it is generally admitted by specialists in exegetical science, that the writings of Moses neither fix the date, nor definitely describe the mode, of creation. Professor Dana, in the closing chapter of his celebrated "Geology," exhibits the first chapter of Genesis as thoroughly harmonious with geology, and as both true and divine. Many theologians combine their distinctive positions with some_theistic view of evolution, especially with that held by Professor Dana. Owenism seems at least as sure of a future as unmodified Darwinism. Dana and Häckel represent respectively, I should say, the use and the abuse of the theory of evolution. 9. It is thus evident, from the history of recent speculation alone, that there are, or well may be, at least thirty different views as to the past history of nature; but Professor Huxley affirms, that, so far as he knows, "there have been, and well can be, only three." That nature has existed from eternity, and that it arose, according to the Miltonic hypothesis, in six natural days, and that it originated by evolution, of which latter he gives a definition,-these are his three theories; and they are a curiously incomplete statement of facts in the case. It does not follow, that, if the first two be overthrown, only the theory represented by his definition is left to be chosen; but this is the implicit and explicit assumption of the New York Lectures. 10. It is the theistic, and not the agnostic or the atheistic, school of evolution which is increasing in influence among the higher authorities of science. Some agnostics are proud of exhibiting under almost atheistic phraseology a really theistic philosophical tendency. Spencer's negations in natural theology amount to the assertion that our knowledge of the Divine existence is like our knowledge of the back-side of the moon,-we know that it is, not what it is. But I assuredly know that there is not a ripple on any sedgy shore, or in the open sea of the whole gleaming watery zone, from here to Japan, which is not influenced by that unknown side as much as by the known. So, in the far-flashing spiritual zones of the universe of worlds, there is not a ripple which does not owe glad allegiance to that law of moral gravitation which proceeds from the whole Divine nature, known and unknown. God is knowable, but unfathomable. The agnostics call God unknowable; but that He is unfathomable is all that they prove, and often all that they mean. 1 See arts. on "Evolution," by Professor Youmans and President Seelye, in Johnson's Cyclopædia, and Johnson's Natural History. II. As Professor Huxley does not notice the different schools of evolutionists, his New York definition of the doctrine is defective through vagueness. 12. For the same reason, it is defective by a suppressed statement of hypotheses which are rivals of his own. 13. It is evident, from the nature of the case, that the question of chief interest to religious science is, whether the new philosophy is to be established in its atheistic, its agnostic, or its theistic form. But Professor Huxley regards the order of the appearance of species as a matter to be studied with all zeal: the causes of their appearance, he thinks, are a matter of subordinate importance. At Buffalo he said, "All that now remains to be asked is, How development was effected? and that is a subordinate question." He thus makes the merely initial question, What? more important than the commanding and final question, Why? The clashing looms in Machinery Hall at the World's Exhibition are of supreme moment; the Corliss Engine, which drives them, is of subordinate and inferior interest. Religious science, therefore, finds Professor Huxley curiously wanting in the sense of logical proportion. 14. The New York Lectures insist on resemblances, and not on differences, in related animal forms. 15. They exaggerate resemblances by broadly inaccurate pictorial representation. The Eocene horse of Wyoming, of the genus Orohippus, Dana says, is not larger than a fox. The bones of its leg and foot were represented in the New York reported illustrations as quite as large as those of the horse. 16. The New York Lectures prove the existence, not of connected links, but of links with many gaps between them. They prove the existence of steps with many and long and unexplained breaks, and should prove the existence of an inclined plane. 17. They fail to reply to the great, and as yet unanswered objections to Darwinism, the absence of discovered links between man and the highest apes, the sterility of hybrids, the mental and moral superiority of man, and the existence, in many animals, of organs of no use to the possessors under the laws of either natural or sexual selection. 66 18. In asserting that this self-contradictory, vague, and historically inexact account of evolution is a demonstration of the truth of his definition, and places evolution, thus defined, on exactly as secure a foundation" as the Copernican theory, which is verified by all experiment, and has in its favour the unanimity of experts, Professor Huxley's conclusions include more than his premises. The New York Lectures disagree in their conclusions with those of higher geological authorities, equally well or better acquainted with the American facts, and notably with the conclusions of Dana and Verrill. According to these professors of the university where the relics are preserved, the bones explain, in part, the variations of one style, but do not account for gaps between groups of animals, and least of all do they account for man." 1 Manual of Geology, ed. of 1875, p. 505. Dana, Manual of Geology, pp. 590-604. |