Sir,—Against your correspondent’s preference for vernacular terms may be set a remark by Dr. Whewell, that ‘the loose and infantine grasp of common language cannot hold objects steadily enough for scientific examination, or lift them from one stage of generalization to another. They must be secured by the rigid mechanism of a scientific phraseology.’ To say that ‘the first vertebrate must have been the product of innumerable antecedent factors,’ is, perhaps, an expression more puzzling than if one merely said that ‘its immediate progenitors’ were ‘a single pair;’ but then it has the advantage of being considerably more suggestive, and a good deal more to the purpose. Among these ‘factors’ of a living creature parents commonly find a place,—two parents generally; in some cases, only one; in some cases, not even one, if we are to believe the advocates of spontaneous generation, or the still popular view in regard to the Creation. To the parental factors of any particular offspring must be added those which are constituted by food and climate and a multitude of changes and chances in the whole course of its existence. Some characters it may derive from remote ancestors, transmitted through, though not developed in, its ‘immediate progenitors.’ It is now forty years since two French anatomists showed the possibility, or even probability, of a connection between the molluscous cuttle-fish and the vertebrate type; and, considering the propensity of the highest vertebrate for perpetually squirting ink at those who meddle with it, most readers of controversy will think the instance well selected. Those who wish to be told what the first vertebrate was probably like, should first accurately define what they mean by a vertebrate. Is a jointed backbone the only essential? And if so, how many vertebrÆ are essentially requisite? A creature with two vertebrÆ would be as much a vertebrate as a creature with three. What shall we say, then, of a creature possessing, if we may use the expression, but a single vertebra? It would not have a jointed backbone. It would not be a vertebrate. Yet, by the simple multiplication of similar parts, in accordance with a thousand analogies, a vertebrate could be developed from it. By the differentiation of these similar parts, which not only might follow, but must follow, a great variety of species could easily be evolved. Those who really take an interest in the problems connected with this subject, and whose ‘convictions’ are not too strong and absolute to be swayed by ascertained facts and logical reasoning will do well to study the ‘Principles of Biology,’ Herbert Spencer. They will there see by what extraordinarily simple gradations the lowliest organisms are connected with higher and the highest forms. They will there find that ‘modification of characters’ is a doctrine less intricate than might be supposed, even if it cannot be wholly explained in words of one syllable.
If any intelligent persons can discern the undulatory theory of light and the modern system of botany in the first chapter of Genesis, no one would wish to complain of their ingenuity, unless they proposed to support a particular theory of inspiration by these discoveries. But then, if the theories of science are only ‘the undulations of human opinion,’ it becomes necessary to ask why the botanical undulation of the present day is accepted as a witness, and the Darwinian undulation rejected. Had the famous Pagan critic, to whom your correspondent ‘R.T.E.’ refers, imagined the sentence, ‘Let there be light, and there was light,’ to be a scientific description instead of a theological one, we may feel sure that he would have condemned it for bombast instead of praising it for its majesty of expression. As it is, he does not declare it to be the sublimest sentence ever uttered, but remarks that ‘the lawgiver of the Jews, no common man, having comprehended the power of the divinity according to the just conception of it, unfolded it agreeably thereto,’ both in this and in the parallel phrase, ‘Let the dry land appear, and it was so.’ That all things which are and which become, both are what they are and become what they become by the simple fiat of the supreme God, is a piece of elementary philosophy and religion, which, I conceive, Sir, none of your correspondents can have any wish to dispute; but that the writer of Genesis anticipated by his scientific knowledge the epoch of Copernicus and Newton, Young and Fresnel, LinnÆus, De Jussieu and Cuvier, is not only not proven by the few simple phrases of his writings that have anything remotely to do with the branches of science which they so nobly illustrated; much more than this, it would be a disgrace and heavy imputation upon him had he known all they believed, and yet expressed himself so badly as to leave the world for thousands of years in ignorance of the very germs of the true theories, so obscurely that no one should ever have dreamed that he was alluding to the true theories till after they had been independently discovered.
Your correspondent ‘Xn’ will find both his pleasure and his profit in reading the chapter on Instinct in ‘Darwin’s Origin of Species.’ It will give him some idea, I say not, how the reasoning faculty was first acquired, but how it may have been gradually developed. By a careful study of the same work he, and many others who need the knowledge, will see that in accordance with Darwinism the deterioration of a species is quite possible. His quaintly expressed argument about Adam’s ‘immediate progenitor’ omits to notice that in the moral world it is a step upward to become capable of sinning, just as in the physical world it is a step upward to become capable of dying, so that the wretchedest man with reason is higher in the scale than the noblest dog, and the humblest plant than the costliest and most beautiful stone. The other difficulty which he puts forward of an abrupt transition between the first man with reason and the parents of such a man without reason is a difficulty, like that in regard to the first vertebrate, one of words rather than of facts. As with the origin of language and of languages, as with the origin of the natural kingdoms and of every individual form of life, so with the origin of reason; could we see the whole series of steps, with their infinitely numerous and sometimes almost infinitely fine and subtle points of discrimination, we should probably be unable to fix upon any one definite division and say, here noise ends and articulate language begins; or, here Saxon ends and English begins; or, this is the top of instinct, and this the dawn of reason.
