The Complete Essays by Herbert Spencer (Vol. 1-3). Spencer Herbert

fish. What are likely to succeed fish? After marine creatures, those which would have the greatest chance of surviving the voyage would be amphibious reptiles; both because they are more tenacious of life than higher animals, and because they would be less completely out of their element. Such reptiles as can live in both fresh and salt water, like alligators; and such as are drifted out of the mouths of great rivers on floating trees, as Humboldt says the Orinoco alligators are; might be early colonists. It is manifest, too, that reptiles of other kinds would be among the first vertebrata to people the new continent. If we consider what will occur on one of those natural rafts of trees, soil, and matted vegetable matter, sometimes swept out to sea by such currents as the Mississippi, with a miscellaneous living cargo; we shall see that while the active, hot-blooded, highly-organized creatures will soon die of starvation and exposure, the inert, cold-blooded ones, which can go long without food, will live perhaps for weeks; and so, out of the chances from time to time occurring during long periods, reptiles will be the first to get safely landed on foreign shores: as indeed they are even now known sometimes to be. The transport of mammalia being comparatively precarious, must, in the order of probability, be longer postponed; and would, indeed, be unlikely to occur until by the enlargement of the new continent, the distances of its shores from adjacent lands had been greatly diminished, or the formation of intervening islands had increased the chances of survival. Assuming, however, that the facilities for immigration had become adequate; which would be the first mammals to arrive and live? Not large herbivores; for they would be soon drowned if by any accident carried out to sea. Not the carnivora; for these would lack appropriate food, even if they outlived the voyage. Small quadrupeds frequenting trees, and feeding on insects, would be those most likely both to be drifted away from their native lands and to find fit food in a new one. Insectivorous mammals, like in size to those found in the Trias and the Stonesfield slate, might naturally be looked for as the pioneers of the higher vertebrata. And if we suppose the facilities of communication to be again increased, either by a further shallowing of the intervening sea and a consequent multiplication of islands, or by an actual junction of the new continent with an old one, through continued upheavals; we should finally have an influx of the larger and more perfect mammals.

      Now rude as is this sketch of a process that would be extremely elaborate and involved, and open as some of its propositions are to criticisms which there is no space here to meet; no one will deny that it represents something like the biologic history of the supposed new continent. Details apart, it is manifest that simple organisms, able to flourish under simple conditions of life, would be the first successful immigrants; and that more complex organisms, needing for their existence the fulfilment of more complex conditions, would afterwards establish themselves in something like an ascending succession. At the one extreme we see every facility. The new individuals can be conveyed in the shape of minute germs; immense numbers of these are perpetually being carried in all directions to great distances by ocean-currents—either detached or attached to floating bodies; they can find nutriment wherever they arrive; and the resulting organisms can multiply asexually with great rapidity. At the other extreme, we see every difficulty. The new individuals must be conveyed in their adult forms; their numbers are, in comparison, utterly insignificant; they live on land, and are very unlikely to be carried out to sea; when so carried, the chances are immense against their escape from drowning, starvation, or death by cold; if they survive the transit, they must have a pre-existing Flora or Fauna to supply their special food; they require, also, the fulfilment of various other physical conditions; and unless at least two individuals of different sexes are safely landed, the race cannot be established. Manifestly, then, the immigration of each successively higher order of organisms, having, from one or other additional condition to be fulfilled, an enormously-increased probability against it, would naturally be separated from the immigration of a lower order by some period like a geologic epoch. And thus the successive sedimentary deposits formed while this new continent was undergoing gradual elevation, would seem to furnish clear evidence of a general progress in the forms of life. That lands thus raised up in the midst of a wide ocean, would first give origin to unfossiliferous strata; next, to strata containing only the lowest marine forms; next to strata containing only the higher marine forms, ascending finally to fish; and that the strata above these would contain reptiles, then small mammals, then great mammals; seems to us demonstrable. And if the succession of fossils presented by the strata of this supposed new continent, would thus simulate the succession presented by our own sedimentary series; must we not conclude that our own sedimentary series very possibly records nothing more than the phenomena accompanying one of these great upheavals? The probability of this conclusion being admitted, it must be admitted that the facts of Paleontology can never suffice either to prove or disprove the Development Hypothesis; but that the most they can do is to show whether the last few pages of the Earth's biologic history, are or are not in harmony with this hypothesis—whether the existing Flora and Fauna can or can not be affiliated upon the Flora and Fauna of the most recent geologic times.

      FOOTNOTE:

      [27] Sir Charles Lyell is no longer to be classed among Uniformitarians. With rare and admirable candour he has, since this was written, yielded to the arguments of Mr. Darwin.

      BAIN ON THE EMOTIONS AND THE WILL.

       Table of Contents

      [First published in The Medico-Chirurgical Review for January, 1860.]

      After the controversy between the Neptunists and the Vulcanists had been long carried on without definite results, there came a reaction against all speculative geology. Reasoning without adequate data having led to nothing, inquirers went into the opposite extreme, and confining themselves wholly to collecting data, relinquished reasoning. The Geological Society of London was formed with the express object of accumulating evidence; for many years hypotheses were forbidden at its meetings: and only of late have attempts to organize the mass of observations into consistent theory been tolerated.

      This reaction and subsequent re-reaction, well illustrate the recent history of English thought in general. The time was when our countrymen speculated, certainly to as great an extent as any other people, on all those high questions which present themselves to the human intellect; and, indeed, a glance at the systems of philosophy that are or have been current on the Continent, suffices to show how much other nations owe to the discoveries of our ancestors. For a generation or two, however, these more abstract subjects have fallen into neglect; and, among those who plume themselves on being "practical," even into contempt. Partly, perhaps, a natural accompaniment of our rapid material growth, this intellectual phase has been in great measure due to the exhaustion of argument, and the necessity for better data. Not so much with a conscious recognition of the end to be subserved, as from an unconscious subordination to that rhythm traceable in social changes as in other things, an era of theorizing without observing, has been followed by an era of observing without theorizing. During this long-continued devotion to concrete science, an immense quantity of raw material for abstract science has been accumulated; and now there is obviously commencing a period in which this accumulated raw material will be organized into consistent theory. On all sides—equally in the inorganic sciences, in the science of life, and in the science of society—we may note the tendency to pass from the superficial and empirical to the more profound and rational.

      In Psychology this change is conspicuous. The facts brought to light by anatomists and physiologists during the last fifty years, are at length being used towards the interpretation of this highest class of biological phenomena; and already there is promise of a great advance. The work of Mr. Alexander Bain, of which the second volume has been recently issued, may be regarded as especially characteristic of the transition. It gives us, in orderly arrangement, the great mass of evidence supplied by modern science towards the building-up of a coherent system of mental philosophy. It is not in itself a system of mental philosophy, properly so called; but a classified collection of materials for such a system, presented with that method and insight which scientific discipline generates, and accompanied with occasional passages of an analytical character.