"Both land and island twice a day."
But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average profundity of both cla.s.ses of caverns from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we know _historically_, that for at least twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousand five hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single sh.e.l.l seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand five hundred years! The sh.e.l.ls which lie embedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our seas.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 87.
ASTARTE ARCTICA.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 88.
TELLINA PROXIMA.]
Above this ancient line of coast we find, at various heights, beds of sh.e.l.ls of vastly older date than those of the low-lying terrace, and many of which are no longer to be found living around our sh.o.r.es. I spent some time last autumn in exploring one of these beds, once a sea bottom, but now raised two hundred and thirty feet over the sea, in which there occurred great numbers of sh.e.l.ls now not British, though found in many parts of Britain at heights varying from two hundred to nearly fourteen hundred feet over the existing sea level. But though no longer British sh.e.l.ls, they are sh.e.l.ls that still continue to live in high northern lat.i.tudes, as on the sh.o.r.es of Iceland and Spitzbergen; and the abundance in which they were developed on the submerged plains and hill-sides of what are now England and Scotland, during what is termed the Pleistocene period, shows of itself what a very protracted period that was. The prevailing tellina of the bed which I last explored,--a bed which occurs in some places six miles inland, in others elevated on the top of dizzy crags,--is a sub-arctic sh.e.l.l (_Tellina proxima_), of which only dead valves are now to be detected on our coasts, but which may be found living at the North Cape and in Greenland. The prevailing astarte, its contemporary, was _Astarte arctica_, now so rare as a British species, that many of our most sedulous collectors have never seen a native specimen, but which is comparatively common on the northern sh.o.r.es of Iceland, and on the eastern coasts of Norway, within the arctic circle. In this elevated Scottish bed of the Pleistocene period I laid these boreal sh.e.l.ls open to the light by hundreds, on the spot evidently where the individuals had lived and died. Under the severe climatal conditions to which (probably from some change in the direction of the gulf stream) what is now Northern Europe had been brought, this tellina and astarte had increased and multiplied until they became prevailing sh.e.l.ls of the British area; and this increase must have been the slow work of ages, during which the plains, and not a few of the table lands, of the country, were submerged in a sub-arctic sea, and Great Britain existed as but a scattered archipelago of wintry islands. But in a still earlier period, of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried forests of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not only its head above water, as now, but seems to have possessed oven more than its present breadth of surface. During this ancient time,--more remote by many centuries than not only the times of the old coast-line, but than even those of the partial submergence of the island,--that northern mammoth lived in great abundance, of which the remains have been found by hundreds in England alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though they have all ceased to exist, with their wild a.s.sociates in the forests and jungles of the Pleistocene, the cave-hyaena, the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear, we know that the descendants of some of their feebler contemporaries, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which they roamed, and whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country, or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of the far north, the Norwegian spruce (_Abies excelsa_), have been found underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag; and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on the Norfolk coast the fishermen engaged in dredging oysters brought ash.o.r.e, in the course of thirteen years (from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand elephants" grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and, various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged, not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact, that remains of this ancient elephant (_Elephas primigenius_) occur all round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the seventieth degree of north lat.i.tude, leads to the same conclusion. It must have required many ages ere an animal that breeds so slowly as the elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 89.
NORWEGIAN SPRUCE.
(Abies excelsa.)]
Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of sh.e.l.ls still exist; and of an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible mussel; and in the Coraline Crag, the first known ancestors of the common horse-mussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain, which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and that no chasm or hiatus--no age of general chaos, darkness, and death--has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation.
Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European continent: the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing races, of not only plants and sh.e.l.ls, but of even some of the mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat, prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of geologic knowledge, as any scheme would have been forty years ago which took it for granted that the writings of Moses _do_ "fix the antiquity of the globe."
The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye Smith, though, save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr.
Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer clear of the difficulty. Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in Genesis as an event which took place about six thousand years ago; both describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; and both represent it as cut off from a previously existing creation by a chaotic period of death and darkness. But while, according to the scheme of Chalmers, both the Biblical creation and the previous period of death are represented as coextensive with the globe, they are represented, according to that of Dr. Smith, as limited and local. They may have extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of Central Asia, in which, when all was life and light in other parts of the globe, there reigned for a time only death and darkness amid the welterings of a chaotic sea; which, at the Divine command, was penetrated by light, and occupied by dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and finally man himself, were created. And this scheme, by leaving to the geologist in this country and elsewhere, save mayhap in some unknown Asiatic district, his unbroken series, certainly does not conflict with the facts educed by geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture altogether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on this, and on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. I have stumbled, too, at the conception of a merely local and limited chaos, in which the darkness would be so complete, that when first penetrated by the light, that penetration could be described as actually a _making_ or creating of light; and that, while life obtained all around its precincts, could yet be thoroughly void of life, A local darkness so profound as to admit no ray of light seems to have fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the ten plagues; but the event was evidently miraculous; and no student of natural science is ent.i.tled to have recourse, in order to extricate himself out of a difficulty, to supposit.i.tious, unrecorded miracle.
Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark, blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also. And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on the purely natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on known causes, of which we have any record in history, were always either very imperfect, like the darkness of your London fogs, or very temporary, like the darkness described by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of volcanic ashes; and so, altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a hypothesis such as that of Dr. Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, I must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning in that grand description of the creation of all things with which the Divine record so appropriately opens, than I could recognize it as forming, were I a.s.sured it referred to but one of many existing creations,--a creation restricted to mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to mayhap a few scores of animals and plants. What, then, is the scheme of reconciliation which I would venture to propound?
Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this evening, not as a philologist, but simply as a student of geological fact, who, believing his Bible, believes also, that though theologians have at various times striven hard to pledge it to false science, geographical, astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, with respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer would have occupied with respect to geography in the days of those doctors of Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the world is round,--not flat; or exactly the position which the mere Christian astronomer would have occupied with respect to astronomy in the days of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Newton and Galileo, that it is the earth which moves in the heavens, and the sun which stands still. The mere geographer or astronomer might have been wholly unable to discuss with Turrettine or the doctors the niceties of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would be perfectly qualified to say:--However great your skill as linguists, your reading of what you term the scriptural geography or scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, then, that I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill in philology, I remark further, that it has been held by accomplished philologists, that the days of the Mosaic creation may be regarded, without doing violence to the genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as _six_ days, is spoken of in the second chapter as _one_ day. True, there are other philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier, Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the _six_ days of the Mosaic narrative in the first chapter were what is a.s.suredly meant by the _day_ referred to in the second,--not natural days, but lengthened periods,--I find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the six. Of the period during which light was created,--of the period during which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,--or of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth"s surface,--we need expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,--sun, moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which we find in the pa.s.sage,--what _seemed_ to be, not what _was_; and as it was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest, on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what _appeared_ at the time to be made that has been described as made? The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until this fourth period of creation that they became visible from the earth"s surface.
The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for,--the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into _three_ great parts. There are many lesser divisions,--divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,--the Palaeozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division.
In the first, or Palaeozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none of these cla.s.ses of organisms give its leading character to the Palaeozoic; they do not const.i.tute its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palaeozoic from the Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was emphatically the period of plants,--"of herbs yielding seed after their kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,--a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage c.u.mbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,--in the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great a.s.semblage, and that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,--in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our ponderous engines,--in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,--and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the lower reaches of your n.o.ble river, and rush in foam over ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their kind."
The middle great period of the geologist--that of the Secondary division--possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age,--the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later, were its huge creeping things,--its enormous monsters of the deep,--and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful _whales_, not, however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian cla.s.s,--ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,--must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon,--creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,--must have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal was a period in which G.o.d created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters.
The Tertiary period had also its prominent cla.s.s of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present time; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons, its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium and colossal megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the largest mammals of the present time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one of its elephants (_Elephas primigenius_) are still so abundant amid the frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed "ivory quarries" have been wrought among their bones for more than a hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly a.s.sociated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. "Grand indeed," says an English naturalist, "was the fauna of the British islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their way through the primeval forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of Africa."
The ma.s.sive cave-bear and large cave-hyaena belonged to the same formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (_Bos longifrons_ and _Bos primigenius_), with a horse of smaller size, and an elk (_Megaceros Hibernicus_) that stood ten feet four inches in height.
Truly this Tertiary age--this third and last of the great geologic periods--was peculiarly the age of great "beasts of the earth after their kind, and of cattle after their kind."
Permit me at this stage, in addressing myself to a London audience, to refer to what has been well termed one of the great _sights_ of London.
An ill.u.s.tration drawn from what must be familiar to you all may impart to your conceptions, respecting the facts on which I build, a degree of tangibility which otherwise they could not possess.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 90.
LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.]
One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments of your great British Museum--the wonder of the world--is that n.o.ble gallery, consisting of a suite of rooms, opening in line, the one beyond the other, which forms its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of coa.r.s.e remember the order in which the organisms of that gallery are ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a s.p.a.cious room devoted to fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal Measures. And if these organisms are in any degree less imposing in their aspect than those of the apartments which follow in the series, it is only because that, from the exceeding greatness of the Coal Measure plants, they can be exhibited in but bits and fragments. Within less than an hour"s walk of the Scottish capital there are single trees of this ancient period deeply embedded in the sandstone strata, which, though existing as mere mutilated portions of their former selves, would yet fail to find accommodation in that great apartment. One of those fossil trees,--a n.o.ble araucarian,--which occurs in what is known as the Granton quarry, is a mere fragment, for it wants both root and top, and yet what remains is sixty-one feet in length by six feet in diameter; and beside it there lies a smaller araucarian, also mutilated, for it wants top and branches, and _it_ measures seventy feet in length by four feet in diameter. I saw lately, in a quarry of the Coal Measures about two miles from my dwelling-house, near Edinburgh, the stem of a plant (_Lepidodendron Sternbergii_), allied to the dwarfish club mosses of our moors, considerably thicker than the body of a man, and which, reckoning on the ordinary proportions of the plant, must have been at least seventy feet in height. And of a kind of aquatic reed (calamites), that more resembles the diminutive mare"s tail of our marshes than aught else that now lives, remains have been found in abundance in the same coal field, more than a foot in diameter by thirty feet in length. Imposing, then, as are the vegetable remains of this portion of the National Museum, they would be greatly more imposing still did they more adequately represent the gigantic flora of the remote age to which they belong.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 91.
CALAMITES CANNaeFORMIS.]
Pa.s.sing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palaeozoic division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of mediaeval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," of cla.s.sical fable, frown on the pa.s.sing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed, in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden, must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous, vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of this division of the gallery.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 92.
MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI.]
We pa.s.s on into the third and lower division, and an entirely different cla.s.s of existences now catch the eye. The huge mastodon, with his enormous length of body, and his tusks projecting from both upper and under jaw, stands erect in the middle of the floor,--a giant skeleton.
We see beside him the great bones of the megatherium,--thigh bones eleven inches in diameter, and claw-armed toes more than two feet in length. There, too, ranged species beyond species, are the extinct elephants; and there the ponderous skull of the dinotherium, with the bent tusks in its lower jaw, that give to it the appearance of a great pickaxe, and that must have dug deeply of old amid the liliaceous roots and bulbs of the Tertiary lakes and rivers. There also are the ma.s.sive heads and spreading horn-cores of the _Bos primigenius_, and the large bones and broad plank-like horns of the great Irish elk. And there too, in the same apartment, but leaning against its further wall,--last, as most recent, of all the objects of wonder in that great gallery,--is the famous human skeleton of Guadaloupe, standing out in bold relief from its slab of gray limestone. It occurs in the series, just as the series closes, a little beyond the mastodon and the mammoths; and, in its strange character as a fossil man, attracts the attention scarce less powerfully than the great Palaeozoic plants, the great Secondary reptiles, or the great Tertiary mammals.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 93.
SKULL OF DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM.
(_Miocene._)]
I last pa.s.sed through this wondrous gallery at the time when the attraction of the Great Exhibition had filled London with curious visitors from all parts of the empire; and a group of intelligent mechanics, fresh from some manufacturing town of the midland counties, were sauntering on through its chambers immediately before me. They stood amazed beneath the dragons of the Oolite and Lias; and, with more than the admiration and wonder of the disciples of old when contemplating the huge stones of the Temple, they turned to say, in almost the old words, "Lo! master, what manner of great beasts are these?" "These are," I replied, "the sea monsters and creeping things of the second great period of organic existence." The reply seemed satisfactory, and we pa.s.sed on together to the terminal apartments of the range appropriated to the Tertiary organisms. And there, before the enormous mammals, the mechanics again stood in wonder, and turned to inquire. Antic.i.p.ating the query, I said, "And these are the huge beasts of the earth, and the cattle of the third great period of organic existence; and yonder, in the same apartment, you see, but at its further end, is the famous fossil man of Guadaloupe, locked up by the petrifactive agencies in a slab of limestone." The mechanics again seemed satisfied. And, of course, had I encountered them in the first chamber of the suite, and had they questioned me respecting the organisms with which _it_ is occupied, I would have told them that they were the remains of the herbs and trees of the _first_ great period of organic existence. But in the chamber of the mammals we parted, and I saw them no more.
There could not be a simpler incident. And yet, rightly apprehended, it reads its lesson. You have all visited the scene of it, and must all have been struck by the three salient points, if I may so speak, by which that n.o.ble gallery lays strongest hold of the memory, and most powerfully impresses the imagination,--by its gigantic plants of the first period (imperfectly as these are represented in the collection), by its strange misproportioned sea monsters and creeping things of the second, and by its huge mammals of the third. Amid many thousand various objects, and a perplexing multiplicity of detail, which it would require the patient study of years even partially to cla.s.sify and know, these are the great prominent features of the gallery, that involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on his attention. They at once pressed themselves on the attention of the intelligent though unscientific mechanics, and, I doubt not, still dwell vividly in their recollections; and I now ask you, when you again visit the national museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of these cla.s.ses of objects, to bear in mind, that the gallery in which they occur represents, both in the order and character of its contents, the course of creation. I ask you to remember that, had there been human eyes on earth during the Palaeozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary periods, they would have been filled in succession by the great plants, the great reptiles, and the great mammals, just as those of the mechanics were filled by them in the museum. As the sun and moon, when they first became visible in the heavens, would have seemed to human eyes--had there been human eyes to see--not only the greatest of the celestial lights, but peculiarly the prominent objects of the epoch in which they appeared, so would these plants, reptiles, and mammals, have seemed in succession the prominent objects of the several epochs in which _they_ appeared. And, asking the geologist to say whether my replies to the mechanics were not, with all their simplicity, true to geological fact, and the theologian to say whether the statements which they embodied were not, with all their geology, true to the scriptural narrative, I ask further, whether (of course, making due allowance for the laxity of the terms botanic and zoological of a primitive language unadapted to the niceties of botanic or zoologic science) the Mosaic account of creation could be rendered more essentially true, than we actually find it, to the history of creation geologically ascertained. If, taking the Mosaic days as equivalent to lengthened periods, we hold that, in giving their brief history, the inspired writer seized on but those salient points that, like the two great lights of the day and night, would have arrested most powerfully, during these periods, a human eye, we shall find the harmony of the two records complete. In your visit to the museum, I would yet further ask you to mark the place of the human skeleton in the great gallery. It stands--at least it stood only a few years ago--in the same apartment with the huge mammifers. And it is surely worthy of remark, that while in both the sacred and geologic records a strongly defined line separates between the period of plants and the succeeding periods of reptiles, and again between the period of reptiles and the succeeding period of mammals, no line in either record separates between this period of mammals and the human period. Man came into being as the lastborn of creation, just ere the close of that sixth day--the third and terminal period of organic creation--to which the great mammals belong. Let me yet further remark, that in each of these three great periods we find, with respect to the cla.s.ses of existences, vegetable or animal, by which they were most prominently characterized, certain well marked culminating points together, if I may so express myself,--twilight periods of morning dawn and evening decline. The plants of the earlier and terminal systems of the Palaeozoic division are few and small: it was only during the protracted _eons_ of the Carboniferous period that they received their amazing development, unequalled in any previous or succeeding time.[16] In like manner, in the earlier or Tria.s.sic deposits of the Secondary division, the reptilian remains are comparatively inconsiderable; and they are almost equally so in its Cretaceous or later deposits. It was during those middle ages of the division, represented by its Lia.s.sic, Oolitic, and Wealden formations, that the cla.s.s existed in that abundance which rendered it so peculiarly, above every other age, an age of creeping things and great sea monsters. And so also, in the Tertiary, regarded as but an early portion of the human division, there was a period of increase and diminution,--a morning and evening of mammalian life. The mammals of its early Eocene ages were comparatively small in bulk and low in standing; in its concluding ages, too, immediately ere the appearance of man, or just as he had appeared, they exhibited, both in size and number, a reduced and less imposing aspect. It was chiefly in its middle and latter, or Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene ages, that the myriads of its huger giants,--its dinotheria, mastodons, and mammoths,--c.u.mbered the soil. I, of course, restrict my remarks to the three periods of organic life, and have not inquired whether aught a.n.a.logous to these mornings and evenings of increase and diminution need be sought after in any of the others.
Such are a few of the geological facts which lead me to believe that the _days_ of the Mosaic account were great periods, not natural days; and be it remembered, that between the scheme of lengthened periods and the scheme of a merely local chaos, which existed no one knows how, and of a merely local creation, which had its scene no one knows where, geological science leaves us now no choice whatever. It has been urged, however, that this scheme of periods is irreconcileable with that Divine "reason" for the inst.i.tution of the Sabbath which he who appointed the day of old has, in his goodness, vouchsafed to man. I have failed to see any force in the objection. G.o.d the Creator, who wrought during six periods, rested during the seventh period; and as we have no evidence whatever that he recommenced his work of creation,--as, on the contrary, man seems to be the last formed of creatures,--G.o.d may be resting still.
The presumption is strong that his Sabbath is an extended period, not a natural day, and that the work of Redemption is his Sabbath day"s work.
And so I cannot see that it in the least interferes with the integrity of the reason rendered to read it as follows:--Work during six periods, and rest on the seventh; for in six periods the Lord created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh period _He_ rested. The Divine periods may have been very great,--the human periods very small; just as a vast continent or the huge earth itself is very great, and a map or geographical globe very small. But if in the map or globe the proportions be faithfully maintained, and the scale, though a minute one, be true in all its parts and applications, we p.r.o.nounce the map or globe, notwithstanding the smallness of its size, a faithful copy. Were man"s Sabbaths to be kept as enjoined, and in the Divine proportions, it would scarcely interfere with the logic of the "reason annexed to the fourth commandment," though in this matter, as in all others in which man can be an imitator of G.o.d, the imitation should be a miniature one.
The work of Redemption may, I repeat, be the work of G.o.d"s Sabbath day.
What, I ask, viewed as a whole, is the prominent characteristic of geologic history, or of that corresponding history of creation which forms the grandly fashioned vestibule of the sacred volume? Of both alike the leading characteristic is progress. In both alike do we find an upward progress from dead matter to the humbler forms of vitality, and from thence to the higher. And after great cattle and beasts of the earth had, in due order, succeeded inanimate plants, sea monsters, and moving creatures that had life, the moral agent, man, enters upon the scene. Previous to his appearance on earth, each succeeding elevation in the long upward march had been a result of creation. The creative fiat went forth, and dead matter came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and plants, with the lower animal forms, came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the oviparous animals,--birds and reptiles,--came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the mammiferous animals,--cattle and beasts of the earth,--came into existence. And, finally, last in the series, the creative fiat went forth, and responsible, immortal man, came into existence. But has the course of progress come, in consequence, to a close? No. G.o.d"s work of elevating, raising, heightening,--of making the high in due progression succeed the low,--still goes on. But man"s responsibility, his immortality, his G.o.d-implanted instincts respecting an eternal future, forbid that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in all the other instances, a work of creation. To create would be to supersede.
G.o.d"s work of elevation _now_ is the work of fitting and preparing peccable, imperfect man for a perfect, impeccable, future state. G.o.d"s seventh day"s work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light, his reason vouchsafed to man for the inst.i.tution of the Sabbath is found to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth and emphasis. G.o.d, it seems to say, rests on _his_ Sabbath from his creative labors, in order that by his Sabbath day"s work he may save and elevate you. Rest ye also on your Sabbaths, that through your co-operation with him in this great work ye may be elevated and saved. Made originally in the image of G.o.d, let G.o.d be your pattern and example. Engaged in your material and temporal employments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, in order that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, rest also in the proportions in which he rests.
One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the earth which we inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast duration; and then the human period began,--the period of a fellow worker with G.o.d, created in G.o.d"s own image. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repet.i.tion of the past?--an introduction a second time of man made in the image of G.o.d?
No. The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once pa.s.sed away again returning. There has been no repet.i.tion of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--"the _kingdom_"--not of glorified man made in the image of G.o.d, but of G.o.d himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and Divine, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of HIM in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. We find the point of elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the final period never to be terminated,--the infinite in height harmoniously a.s.sociated with the eternal in duration. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress G.o.dwards,--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true G.o.d and true man,--as Creator and created,--we recognize the adorable Monarch of all the future!
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION.
The history of creation is introduced into the "Paradise Lost" as a piece of narrative, and forms one of the two great episodes of the poem.
Milton represents the common father of the race as "led on" by a desire to know
"What within Eden or without was done Before his memory;"
and straightway Raphael, "the affable archangel," in compliance with the wish, enters into a description of the six days" work of the Divine Creator,--a description in which, as Addison well remarks, "the whole energy of our tongue is employed, and the several great scenes of creation rise up to view, one after another, in such a manner, that the reader seems present at this wonderful work, and to a.s.sist among the choirs of angels who are spectators of it." In the other great episode of the poem,--that in which the more prominent changes which were to happen in after time upon the earth are made to pa.s.s before Adam, he is represented as carried by Michael to the top of a great mountain, lofty as that on which in a long posterior age the Tempter placed our Saviour, and where the coming events are described as rising up in vision before him. In the earlier episode, as in those of the Odyssey and aeneid, in which heroes relate in the courts of princes the story of their adventures, there is but narrative and description; in the later, a series of magnificent pictures, that form and then dissolve before the spectator, and comprise, in their vivid tints and pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. And one of these two episodes,--that which relates to the creation of all things,--must have as certainly had a place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human memory to record, had he not been permitted, like Adam of old, to hold intercourse with the intelligences that had preceded him in creation, or with the great Creator himself, the Author of them all; and the question has been asked of late, both in our own country and on the Continent, What was the form and nature of the revelation by which the pre-Adamic history of the earth and heavens was originally conveyed to man? Was it conveyed, like the sublime story of Raphael, as a piece of narrative, dictated, mayhap, to the inspired penman, or miraculously borne in upon his mind? Or was it conveyed by a succession of sublime visions like that which Michael is represented as calling up before Adam, when, purging his "visual nerves with euphrasy and rue," he enabled him to see, in a series of scenes, the history of his offspring from the crime of Cain down to the destruction of the Old World by a flood? The pa.s.sages in which the history of creation is recorded give no intimation whatever of their own history; and so we are left to balance the probabilities regarding the mode and form in which they were originally revealed, and to found our ultimate conclusions respecting them on evidence, not direct, but circ.u.mstantial.
The Continental writers on this curious subject may be regarded as not inadequately represented by Dr. J.H. Kurtz, Professor of Theology at Dorpat,--one of the many ingenious biblical scholars of modern Germany.
We find him stating the question, in his _Bibel und Astronomie_ (second edition, 1849), with great precision and clearness, but in a manner, so far at least as the form of his thinking is concerned, strikingly characteristic of what may be termed the theological fashion of his country in the present day. "The source of all human history," he says, "is _eye-witness_, be it that of the reporter, or of another whose account has been handed down. Only what man has himself seen or experienced can be the subject of man"s historical compositions. So that history, so far as man can write it, can begin with but the point at which he has entered into conscious existence, and end with the moment that const.i.tutes the present time. Beyond these points, however, lies a great province of historic development, existing on the one side as the _Past_, on the other side as the _Future_. For when man begins to be an observer or actor of history, he himself, and the whole circ.u.mstantials of his condition, have already come historically into being. Nor does the flow of development stop with what is his present. Millions of influences are spinning the thread still on; but no one can tell what the compound result of all their energies is to be. Both these sorts of history, then, lie beyond the region of man"s knowledge, which is shut up in s.p.a.ce and time, and can only call the present its own. It is G.o.d alone who, standing beyond and above s.p.a.ce and time, sees backwards and forwards both the development which preceded the first _present_ of men, and that which will succeed this our latest _present_. Whatever the difference of the two kinds of history may be, they hold the same position in relation both to the principle of the human ignorance and the principle of the human knowledge. The principle of the ignorance is man"s condition as a creature; the principle of the knowledge is the Divine knowledge; and the medium between ignorance and knowledge is objectively Divine revelation, and subjectively prophetic vision by man, in which he beholds with the eye of the mind what is shut and hid from the eye of his body." From these premises Dr. Kurtz goes on to argue that the pre-Adamic history of the past being _theologically_ in the same category as the yet undeveloped history of the future, that record of its leading events which occurs in the Mosaic narrative is simply _prophecy_ described backwards; and that, coming under the prophetic law, it ought of consequence to be subjected to the prophetic rule of exposition. There are some very ingenious reasonings employed in fortifying this point; and, after quoting from Eichhorn a pa.s.sage to the effect that the opening chapter in Genesis is much rather a creative picture than a creative history, and from Ammon to the effect that the author of it evidently takes the position of a beholder of creation, the learned German concludes his general statement by remarking, that the scenes of the chapter are prophetic tableaux, each containing a leading phase of the drama of creation. "Before the eye of the seer," he says, "scene after scene is unfolded, until at length, in the seven of them, the course of creation, in its main _momenta_, has been fully represented." The revelation has every characteristic of prophecy by vision,--prophecy by eye-witnessing; and may be perhaps best understood by regarding it simply as an exhibition of the actual phenomena of creation presented to the mental eye of the prophet under the ordinary laws of perspective, and truthfully described by him in the simple language of his time.