CUVIER AND GOETHE.

365

yet seen by all careful anatomists. In some quadrupeds, and in most birds, there is a membrane which covers the eye in sleep. Anatomists find a rudiment of this membrane at the internal angle of the human eye. 'So numerous' said S. Hilaire, are the examples of this kind disclosed by comparative anatomy, that I am convinced the germs of all organs which we see, exist at once in all species, and that the existence of so many organs half-effaced or totally obliterated is due to the greater development of others-a development always made at the expense of the neighbouring organs.'

In 1830, Cuvier and S. Hilaire had their famous discussion before the French Academy. The chief subject was the mutability of species, Cuvier maintaining that the same forms had been perpetuated since the origin of things; and S. Hilaire, that all species are the result of development. Never were disputants more equally matched. Never was evidence more equally balanced. Never had disputants a wiser Palæmon. 'I do not judge;' said Goethe, 'I only record.' So great was the interest in this discussion that it pre-occupied the public mind, though France was on the very eve of a great political revolution. The same year-almost the same month' says Isidore S. Hilaire, in the biography of his father, 'took away Goethe and Cuvier. Unity of organic composition-admitted by the one, denied by the other, had the last thoughts of both. The last words of Cuvier answer to the last pages of Goethe.'

Forty years before the discussion between Cuvier and S. Hilaire, Goethe had announced the doctrine of development as the law of the vegetable kingdom. In his 'Metamorphoses of Plants,' he supposes nature to have ever had before her an ideal plant an idea corresponding to Robinet's more general conception of an ideal man. To realize the ideal plant was the great object of nature. Every individual plant is a partial fulfilment of the ideal-every stage of progress an advancement of the concrete to the abstract. Not only are all plants formed after one type, but the appendages of every individual plant are repetitions of each other. The flowers are metamorphosed leaves. Goethe's doctrine was afterwards taken up by Schleiden, but in a modified form. He supposed every plant to have two representative organs, the stem as well as the leaf. The leaf is attached to the ascending stem, and, besides its common form, it takes other forms, as scales, bracts, sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils. What seemed at first but the fancy of a poet is now the scientific doctrine of vegetable morphology.

366 VESTIGES OF A NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION.

The French naturalists reached the doctrine of development through the study of external nature. But, with the Germans, it followed upon their transcendental philosophy. Spinoza's theology recognized a bond between God and nature, unknown both to the theologians and the naturalists of that day. In his theology, creation was the emanation of the Deity as well as His work. This had been the dream of the Brahman; and, though the dream might not be true, the Transcendentalists thought that there was truth in the dream. Nature produced' was the mirror of Nature producing.' The One who was working in nature, produced in nature the image of Himself. In Schelling's philosophy, nature was the counterpart or the correspondent of mind. The final cause' said Schelling, 'of all our contemplation of nature is to know that absolute unity which comprehends the whole, and which suffers only one side of itself to be known in nature. Nature is, as it were, the instrument of the absolute Unity, through which it eternally executes and actualizes that which is prefigured in the Absolute understanding. The whole Absolute is therefore cognizable in nature, though phenomenal nature only exhibits it in succession, and produces in an endless development that which the true and real eternally possesses.' Lorenz Öken, a disciple of Schelling's, found in actual nature what his master fonnd in ideal. Nature was a divine incarnation-the progress of Deity in 'His other being-from imperfection to perfection. Deity reaches its full manifestation in man, who is the sum total of all animals, and consequently the highest incarnation of the Divine. *

The doctrine of development was first made popular in England by the Vestiges of a Natural History of Creation.' The author of the Vestiges' rejected, as vicious, Lamarck's notion of an 'internal sentiment.' But even S. Hilaire had seen that the function followed the organ, and not the organ the function. He adopted Robinet's principle, that the phenomenon of reproduction was the key to the genera of species. This, to some extent, had been accepted by Lamarck, but more fully by Robinet, who, like the author of the Vestiges' in showing the progress of the development of men from animalcules, illustrated it by the changes which the tadpole undergoes in its progress towards being a perfect and complete member of the Batrachian

Lorenz Oken saw the bleached skull of a deer in the Hartz forest, and he exclaimed it is a vertebral column.' Anatomists are now agreed that Oken was right-the same plan that served for the back bone served also for the skull.

GOD WORKING IN NATURE.

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order. Oken, too, had adopted the same principle, illustrating the stages of development from vesicles to men by corresponding stages in intero-uterine life.

To make earth, according to this analogy, the mother of the human race, it was necessary to suppose that the earth had existed long before man appeared. That such had been the case was now evident from geology. The earth had travailed in birth, from the earliest of the geologic ages till the close of the Tertiary, when divine man, her noblest child, was born. La Place had shown in his nebular theory, how the earth and other planets were first formed by the separating and condensing of nebular matter. Supposing his theory to be true, it was only necessary to show the continuation of the same progressive movement, and the same working of natural laws. La Place may have thought it unnecessary to suppose that the Divine mind was directing this natural law in its operations. But the author of the 'Vestiges' saw in this progressive working the mode of operation most becoming the Divine Being, and most analogous to all that we know of His ordinary working. In nature, there are no traces of Divine fiats,' nor of 'direct interferences.' All beginnings are simple, and through these simples nature advances to the more complex. The same agencies of nature which we now see at work are sufficient to account for the whole series of operations displayed in organic geology. We still see the volcano upheaving mountains, and new beds of detritus forming rocks at the bottom of the sea. 'A common furnace exemplifies the operation of the forces concerned in the Giant's Causeway, and the sloping ploughed field after rain showing at the end of the furrows, a handful of washed and neatly composed mud and sand, illustrates how nature made the Deltas of the Ganges and the Nile. On the ripple bank or sandy beaches of the present day we see nature's exact repetition of the operation by which she impressed similar features on the sandstones of the carboniferous era. Even such marks as wind slanted rain would in our day produce on tide deserted sands have been read on the tablets of the ancient strata It is the same nature-that is to say, God, through or in the manner of nature, working everywhere and in all time, causing the wind to blow, and the rain to fall, and the tide to ebb and flow, immutable ages before the birth of our race, the same as now.'

The author appeals to the astronomical discoveries of Newton and La Place; and to the facts in geology attested by Murchison and Lyell, as affording ample ground for the conclusion that

368

MR. CHARLES DARWIN.

the Creator formed the earth by a complicated series of changes similar to those which we see going on in the present day. As He works now, so has He wrought in the ages that are past. The organic, indeed, is mixed up with the physical, but it is not, therefore, necessary to suppose that because there are two classes of phenomena, there must be two distinct modes of the exercise of Divine Power. Life pressed in as soon as there were suitable conditions. Organic beings did not come at once on the earth by some special act of the Deity. The order was progressive. There was an evolution of being, corresponding to what we now see in the production of an individual. That life has its origin from inorganic bodies is shown by the very constitution of organic bodies, these being simply a selection of the elementary substances which form the inorganic or non-vitalized.

The development doctrine has found a rigidly scientific advocate in Mr. Charles Darwin He has not been content with general principles and theories, but has collected a multitude of observations or facts which tend to show not only that all complex organisms have undergone changes, but how the changes were effected. Any naturalist, he says, reflecting on the natural affinities of organic beings, their embryological relations, geographical distribution, and geological succession might reasonably come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created but, had descended, like varieties from other species. But the conclusion would not be satisfactory till it could be shown how the different species were modified so as to acquire that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which excite our admiration. Mr. Darwin admits that external conditions, such as climate and food, may have had some influence, but he thinks them insufficient to account for all the changes, and so he adds what he calls the principle of natural selection." Among the multitude of beings that come into existence, the strong live and the weak fail in the struggle for life. As the struggle is continually recurring, every individul of a species which has a variation, in the way of a quality superior to the others, has the better chance of surviving the others. And as individuals transmit, to their descendants, their acquired variations, they give rise to favored races, which are nature's 'selections." The neck of the giraffe has not been elongated by having made efforts to reach the branches of the lofty trees, but in a time of scarcity a longer-necked variety being able to obtain food where others could not obtain it survived the other varieties and thus become a species.

SIR CHARLES LYELL AND PROFESSOR HUXLEY. 369

Mr. Darwin's doctrine of natural selection was suggested by the varieties produced in domesticated animals through man's selections. But the deeper principle is the great tendency to variation, which is found in all plants and animals. Variations determine the selection. The early progenitor of the ostrich, for example, may have had habits like the bustard, and as natural selection increased in successive generations the size and weight of the body, its legs were used more, and its wings less, until they became incapable of flight. In Madeira there are two species of one kind of insect. The one has short wings, and feeds on the ground, the other has long wings, and finds its food on trees and bushes. The wings of each have been determined by the conditions on which they could live in the island. Those which were able to battle with the winds continued to fly, and their wings grew larger, those that were unable to battle with the winds found their food on the ground, and rarely or ever attempted to fly. Animal life will adapt itself to any climate, and become adapted to any conditions of existence provided the changes are not effected suddenly. The elephant and the rhinoceros, though now tropical or subtropical in their habits, were once capable of enduring a colder region; species have been found in glacial climates. This capacity for variation is not denied by any naturalists. Some suppose it to have limits beyond which nature never passes, but these limits cannot be defined. Mr. Darwin can see no trace of them, and for the facts which he has noticed he can find no explanation but in the doctrine he advocates, that nature forms varieties, and these in time, through natural selection, become new species.

The development doctrine has received but little additional illustration since Mr. Darwin's work. From a more extensive study of the mode of nature's working connected with researches in geology, Sir Charles Lyell has been led to adopt Mr. Darwin's doctrine of the mutability of species; and Professor Huxley has endeavoured to find the missing and most missed link in the development chain-that which connects man with the brute creation. This intermediary was the great want of De Maillet and Robinet. The sea-man was legendary, and the ourang was little known, and M. De Chaillu had not yet invaded the territory of the gorilla. Professor Huxley finds most humanity in the chimpanzee. He has, perhaps, demonstrated that monkeys as well as men have the posterior lobe' of the brain, and the 'hippo-campus minor'-that they are no longer to be classed as four-handed' animals, but as having two feet and two hands;

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