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or animal, it must be a resultant of a joint effort of all the vital forces of the organ. ism. For this reason it is their epitome and representative, and can be nothing more. The germ will have just such powers, and in such degree as may enable it to continue the species of the parent plant or animal. If there be two sexes, the embryo may reach the united perfection of both, but can exceed them only by the intervention of some other power, (a nisus, for example,) not inherent in the species or in the nature of matter.

Let it be considered that the laws of living matter, though superior to those of dead matter as to the forms they appear in, are not able to surpass or exceed necessity. There is no action of an animal, of which the whole possibility does not lie in it mechanically. Mind employs, but cannot subdue, or surpass, the material and necessary laws. A man may not resist gravity, but by obeying it; "we subdue nature by obeying its laws."

What, then, shall be said of this nisus, by which an animal is enabled to produce a something greater, and more powerful, than itself? by which a plant may produce an animalcule; an animalcule a mollusk; a mollusk a fish; a fish a serpent; a serpent a bird; a bird a quadruped, and so on up to man? This is a progress quite miraculous, out of the limits of necessity and nature.

Though we know that there is a spiritual nisus in man, the human soul striving continually against matter, yet it is the proper nature of the soul to do so, and to fail of this, would be to fall short of its proper nature, as plants do that die seedless. But, were the actions of any man ever known to exceed the possibility of mind and matter? By an inward nisus to lift one's self off the ground, or to overleap one's own shadow! Just this kind of impossibility lies before a "nisus of species."

Mathematicians are able to show us that the universe, taken as a whole, is changeless and fixed, every action balanced by an equal reaction. Whatever, therefore, moves and exists in this universe, falls under this eternal law of equilibriums. Man fancies himself making, while he is only arranging, and rearranging. Animals seem to generate, and "create," force and power. It all lay latent in them, and was gathered from the powers of the food which they assimilated. They, therefore, like crystals, and like the body of man, are only vague

forms, transiently cast up like waves. Each wave reacts in subsiding, and so raises another.

Dreary and unsatisfactory though it seem, to this conclusion are we driven, that no man can so much as imagine the beginning. A stupendous darkness hangs over the beginning as over the end; no science, no thought, can penetrate it; for science moves among conditions and sensible appearances, but here is no condition, no appearance. And thought can only gather the abstract of what is known; but here is nothing seen, or known. We are driven therefore to say, "in the beginning God made the world,”—he spoke it, and it was ;-but to us the manner of his speech is, as of an eternal silence.

Where it is impossible to know, it is a comfort to discern the impossibility; perhaps the truest mark of ascertaining is to know the limits of knowledge.

Facts, on the other hand, press heavily against the progressive hypothesis. Idealists are fond of declaring that nature has no breaks, no leaps, in ber system, that

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all is harmony and transition." But the reverse is true, in the fact; there is even no such thing in science as a "transition," and in nature there is an appearance, only, of transition, through imperfection of the senses. "In the first rudiments, and dark beginnings," as it were, "of things," matter appears divided into opposing properties, between which there is correlation and opposition, but no "transition." There is no intermediate element between the positive and negative powers of matter; the very notion of these forbids the possibility of an intermedium. Then, in the second place, the elementary atoms themselves repel each other absolutely, and will not be thrust together; and, lastly, the species of these elements, the chemical species of iron, gold, oxygen, and the others, cannot be compounded or confused together, but discover differences, chasms, so to speak, from one to another, over which imagination cannot pass without going through darkness and vacuum. From gold to platinum, from lead to mercury, from chlorine to iodine, it is a great step; but these bodies are closely affined. It is impossible to name the steps of a "transition" from hydrogen to carbon; substances at once dissimilar and allied. The doctrine of a progress, applied so readily to species of animals, makes a strange figure with those of chemical atoms. Was there a rudimental

atom which began "to progress," running through the species of oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, and the rest, in a progress of some myriads of millennia? or is the process of atomic generation still active, producing new species for us each day?

Every true species must have a difference, a complete new feature; and this feature, is a something which cannot be divided in half, and one-half conferred on a transitional species. To be more explicit there is no transitional group between the ape and man, which has one-half of the whole moral quality proper to a man. For we believe this moral quality to be a something indivisible, existing either as a whole, or not at all. A man who shows but one-half, or but one trait, of his moral quality, is called insane or idiotic. Now the progressive theory compels us to suppose that the progenitors of the patriarchs were a moral lusus naturæ, a kind of idiots with onehalf a soul, or with the rudiment of a soul.

Nature passes by leaps or intervals, even in motion itself. Even gravity is measured by pulses, and the cooling of a solid must be a rapid vibration of its parts. Motion of a body, by gravitation in space, begins pulsatile, and so continues; nor is there any smooth gliding of masses, except in imagination, and in our imperfect senses. These things are not matters of speculation, but of necessity, by the logic of dynamics. Much less can this ideal continuity and gliding of the forms into each other, be discovered in the animal or vegetable kingdom. Where two species approach so near that an intermediate can be produced by their union, as between the horse and the ass, the intermediate, as is well known, is malformed, and of an unproductive nature. There is no instance, even among vegetables, of a hybrid species, capable of perfect self-continuance; a fact of long observation, proving that nature, figuratively speaking, abhors an intermediate. Those varieties, even of the human race, intermediate between the more marked kinds, as between the Negro and Caucasian races, never become distinct and powerful nations. There is no permanent nation of mulattoes, or of half-blood Malays, or of semi-Caucasians in any part of the globe.

To return an instant to this famous doctrine of types or stirpes? What is meant by a type, or by a stirps? Mr. Swainson's notion of types consists not at all with the Lamarkian notion of transitions, or nisus. For the type is a fixed form, one of a circle* of five forms.

The animal kingdom is first divided into three groups, and the lowest of these into three others, making five in all; and the whole five are a circle, or completed group. Now, it follows from the principles of this first group, that every lesser group should vary in the same manner, and even that every species should vary in the same manner. There are five varieties, for example, of the species Man, and five subdivisions of the genus Thrush. Such are the water thrushes, the ground thrushes, slender-billed thrushes, hawk-like, or destructive, and typical omniverous thrushes. The water kind, which is lowest, discover a mode which Nature takes to make one group of her thrushes live an aquatic life, by the side of brooks and pools, and in shady damp hollows. They sing but seldom, and have inferior voices, like all birds of an aquatic habit. They hunt water insects, and, perhaps, can dive and swim; yet are indubitable thrushes, not to be mistaken for any other kind. The second group are the ground thrushes, which have stout legs, with thick, short claws. They feed much upon berries, and habitually pick up insects and worms. Their make is domestic and thick-set; they build their nests low, sometimes on the ground. The third kind are the timid slenderlimbed and slender-billed thrushes. They should haunt meadows, sides of brooks, and have other habits, analogous with those of the plover and sandpiper; but they are true thrushes in their shape.

There remain two other groups, one like hawks, with a strong notch in the bill-bold, loud singing, aerial, elegantly formed, and of plain blue, or brown colors; and another, with shorter and stouter bills, darker and plainer plumage, and a clear, sharp, and varied song; which last are the typical kind, and stand at the head of the group. If we adopt this elegant system of Mr. Swainson's, which discovers so perfect an accordance between the varieties of species and the habitations appointed them, we must lay

The natural groups of animals are circular when they diverge in two directions from the type, the divergent branches reuniting in the remote, or abnormal, forms.

aside and forget the progressive hypothesis, or rather the notion of a gradual transition; for, of every least group of species there can only be five kinds, to wit, the aquatic; the domestic, or groundling; the slender-limbed, or amphibious; the fierce, aerial; and the well-formed, intelligent, typical. Between these there can be none but hybrids, or middling varieties, of a perishable make. The "gradual progression" would have to overleap these natural boundaries set by nature upon her forms; and which are there, whether we please to see it or not the animal being, of necessity, moulded to some habitat, lest it perish through mere uncertainty.

This ingenious theory has been in volved in mystery, and laid open to ridicule, by its authors, through their earnestness in advancing the doctrine of mystical numbers; as if there was a sacredness in numbers five and three. But the Aristotelian syllogism of major, minor and conclusion, is open to the same ridicule, if one chooses. One might as well ridicule nature for giving all quadrupeds five toes, or rudiments of toes; "As if there was a certain sacredness in number five!" Would three have done as well?

The body of an animal is so constructed, it cannot vary its species in more than five directions. For, either it is typical, the brain and nerves predominating; or it is active and aerial, the respiratory and muscular predominating; or it is sluggish and inferior, deviating in three different manners through predominance of the digestive, the glandular, and circulatory apparatus; which make the entire organic mass of the body. The predominance of the digestive function, as in the hog and the duck, marks the abdominal, or aquatic, type; of which the fishes are an example, in the circle of red-blooded animals. In amphibia the circulatory, and in reptiles the glandular, system, marks the type; giving to the one a round and slender form, and to the other a slow and enduring circulation. Each type adheres to the habitat for which it is made. By the hypothesis of Maclea, adopted and expanded by Swainson, a type is a something distinct in itself, and not an accidental result of circumstances. The same laws of matter which arranged the earth as it is, would necessitate that the types of animals be made suitable to it; but there is nothing in the nature of water to create an aquatic type, nor in the nature of

land to create a walking type. Nor is there any effect in land or water which should change one of these into the other; but contrarily, the aquatic should become more aquatic by any such influence, and the terrestrial more terrestrial. The tendency should rather be downwards than upwards. But, in very fact, no tendency, either way, is discoverable.

If we find, that in the order of creation, the inferior were first created, and then the superior, ending with man, it seems no more than might have been expected, when the nature of things is considered, even before the proof of any order was shown by the geologists. But take them in what order we may, the facts of geology prove only that the inferior animals came first, because their places were the first to be ready for them. But if any superior animal could find a habitat sooner than its inferior, the superior may have been first in order.

"But why," it is objected, "will we insist on the immediate and instantaneous creation of an adult animal, seeing that a natural and convenient means lay open for generating men and animals out of the bodies of their inferiors?"

This order of creation, it is said, would be as far as possible in accordance with the existing laws of matter. A certain species might be taken as a mould for the production of a higher species. Thus, in the eggs of certain birds, at a certain moment, (a moment established by the eternal laws,) a species should be hatched, intermediate between bird and beast. After a longer period, the earth being ready, the eggs of this intermediate produce perfect quadrupeds of a low grade; the series making a saltus, or leap, from time to time, either by nisus, by law, or by miracle. Arrived now at the epoch when an ape is to give birth to human species, let us consider the circumstances and conditions of this immense saltus. An intelligent species of ape, inhabiting, it may be, a forest in Congo, or in the Caucasus, begins suddenly to produce human infants. A miraculous power causes all the females of this species to conceive human embryos. By an equally miraculous interference these females nourish the fœtus, suckle it when born an infant, after a miraculous gestation, the life of the mother being preserved as by miracle; and finally, by a greater miracle, the helpless human infant is instructed by apes in all the offices needful to a human existence.

Here is a continuous and extravagant departure from all the laws of nature, for the space of nine months' gestation and fifteen years' education of a human infant. The female ape, be it ever so intelligent, will not suckle its young and educate it in this fashion, without miraculous interference. Precisely the same difficulty-a resort to miracle for every slight event, or to some unimaginable nisus, or "law" which knows no law lies before this whole progressive hypothesis, taken with its stirpes, saltus, grades, and infinite periods.

On the other hand not a single law of nature is violated, nor a note of order departed from by the creation of a perfect species in the place prepared for it. It appears in its place on earth, and goes on there, harmoniously with preexisting forms.

In regard to the theory of types, entertained by Swainson and other naturalists, it needs to be carefully separated from the progressive hypothesis, as a theory quite distinct from it, and incompatible with it. By the progressive plan, nature, having produced germs by a miracle or nisus, in the water of the sea and rivers, exalts them gradually, or by saltus. Their numbers diminish as their frames become more complicated, and their reproductive powers weaker. All the species, without exception, are progressing simultaneously. There would, consequently, be a disappearance of the inferior races, if the productive power of sand and water be not continued as at the first. At the present moment, as at the first instant, this power is operating everywhere, producing animalcules, and ripening these into germs of more complex orders.

The number and species of the creatures thus generated, would be determined by the variety of the situations prepared for them. In liquids generally, which contain vegetable or animal substances, a class would appear like the monad and the sponge-animalcules of the lowest order, devoid of senses, and perhaps even of sensations. These are of the aquatic type. In them the cellular, and least organized parts predominate, as in the abdominal parts of the higher classes.

The second type will be the parasitic, or semi-aquatic. It includes star-fishes, intestinal worms, and those shapeless cystoid animals that appear in diseased flesh. These last are generated by the

bodies they inhabit. From the lower parasitic species of this type, the higher are to be gradually produced. The type itself has its representatives in every natural group of animals, even in that of man. It is characterized by slender softness of make, timidity and paleness of the fluids. These two, the aquatic and semi-aquatic types, continually originate in situations proper to them. They begin to be progressive at the instant of production, and are gradually ripened into higher forms. Cysts become pinworms, pin-worms tæniæ, tæniæ rise gradually to be star-fish; these again are made pea-worms, and these insects; insects rise into higher forms.

The aquatic type, departing from sea animalcules, ascends by another route towards mollusca. By the time that pin worms are become insects, polypi have attained the rank of cuttle-fish; these again change into cartilaginous fishes. Insects, on the other hand, become reptiles, and both fishes and reptiles rise to the condition of the higher classes, ending in quadrupeds, apes and men. Such is one result of a union of the idea of type with that of progression.

If we insist on the existence of only one original type, or germ-the sea animalcule for example-then it follows that animalcules were gradually exalted into radiate and intestinal animals on the one side, and into mollusks on the other; that mollusks changed into fishes, and radiate animals into insects-the two sides of the circle coming together, as before, in man.

Or better, we may say, that the first germ, or monad, branched in five directions, producing five groups; that each of these did the same on its part; but that of all these, the typical, or lineal only, arose to become vertebrate and human; the four aberrant branches perishing out, or remaining undeveloped.

And here a new miracle must be invented for the branching of the first germ, and for checking the development in each group of the four abnormal, imperfect branches. Or, if miracle be disliked, a new "law" must be imagined, without help of fact, a "law," namely, of the " cessation or extinction of races." We must imagine the life of a species to be limited like the life of an individual, by secret causes in its nature. Of the five branches that radiate from the first germ, two at most may go on, and be perpetuated. By a third wonder these

two branches begin at last to approach each other. Originating forms more and more alike, they both end in producing

man.

In the same manner an immense variety of imaginary new modes and principles may be invented, with no assistance from fact. Their various possibilities need not detain us here. The confusion they involve makes them admirable topics of argument, the better as they lean less and less upon sensuous evidence. Their effect must be to intricate and retard all science.

Two modes of spontaneous generation are claimed as proved by the progressionists; one in liquids, and one in the bodies of animals; the first by aid of heat and electricity, and the second by force of animal life. The second kind are the intestinal worms. These, of course, will never be produced until the animals in which they live are first perfected. Tania, for instance the tape worm, will not be generated until man is made and perfected-and so of a multitude of others. In the same manner vibrio will not appear, until vinegar and sour paste are made. Monad and vorticella, living in a great variety of waters, in the sea, rivers, pools, &c., may, with their congeners, go on rising in their species; but for the genera of tape worms, vinegar eels, and their kind, there is no hope of a progression. They waited for men to be produced, and vinegar to be made, and with the death and decay of men and vinegar, they fall and are not. None of the existing superior animals, it seems, were produced from the worms which inhabit their own bowels.

The superior animals must then have been produced from monads that inhabit open waters, these alone being able to elevate and perfect their kinds. Men arose on the molluscous side of the house, and not on the parasitic.

By another shape of protean possibility, there may have been five original types. The molluscous and parasitic are two of the five. Each continent had a complete set of types of its own. In each set the typical stem alone perfected itself, the others having their progression cut off, or proceeding only to a certain length, and then ceasing.

Another of the endless confusions in which this hypothesis involves us, is that of an "intermediate germ," branch

ing out on one side into vegetable, and on the other into animal species. As the vegetable germ perfects itself more and more, becoming first a fungus, then a fern, then a palm, and so on through all the stages, to an oak or an elm, it departs farther and farther from the animal. All that oak germs can do without a miracle or a "nisus," is to produce oaks of a more perfect kind. But where, with this nisus, is the vegetable progression to end? Going farther and farther from the animal nature, whither do these species tend? Shall we see them change into vegetable angels-trees of paradise?

But now, upon the simplest analogies, it seems unnatural to admit any change in species; since the same causes which sustain must also limit its existence. A monad must remain a monad; a bird, a bird; a man, a man. Each species, perfecting its own specific nature, grows more and more like itself, and aims only to perfect itself. A tree may, perhaps, become more than ever a tree; a man, more than ever a man. A natural law of "progression" requires that there shall be a self-likeness, from first to last, in the thing which progresses. But because there is no rudiment of ape in tree, or of man in ape, the one cannot be perfected into the other.

It will be instantly answered, that all animals, including men, "differ only in degree, and not in essence."—that as the ape is better than the dog; in the same manner, the man is better than the ape.

This opinion of a "difference of degree," taken for the only difference among species, seems to be the very root of the whole progressive doctrine. If the addition of a little more-if the freer development of what is already present in a dog, can make an ape of it; and the development of what is in an ape make it a man; then, truly, there are no species in nature. The germs of all animals are one; and the germs of all plants are one; as the hypothesis makes them to be. Admit this, and we seem to find the whole man latent in a polypus. Nay, the whole series of species lies potentially in a grain of silica, or ammonia. Professor Mulder would have the atoms of matter to be little vesicles, with shells of an infinitesimal thinness, stuffed full of powers and qualities, including those of life, and perhaps of intelligence.* But

* See Mulder's Chemistry: American Edition.

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