Spent this evening
diligently cutting the leaves of Darwin’s much discussed book on The Origin of Species and making acquaintance
with its general scope and aim. It’s a laborious, intelligent, and weighty
book. First obvious criticism on it seems this, that Darwin has got hold of a
truth which he wants to make out to be the
one generative law of organic life. Because he shews that the fauna and flora
of a group of islands lying near a certain continent are so like those of that
continent, though differing specifically therefrom, and so unlike those of
other regions more remote, as to make it probable that they are the offspring
of the continental species modified by the altered conditions of their new
habitat, he considers himself entitled to affirm that all beasts, birds, and
creeping things, from mammal to medusa, are developments from one stock, and
that man is the descendant of some ancestral archaic fish, with swimming
bladder improved into lungs, that flying fish have by successive minute steps of
progress through countless ages become albatrosses, and flying squirrels bats.
But I suspect that He who created and upholds this great marvelous system of
various harmonious life is not obliged to conformity with any one Law of
Creation and preservation that Darwin’s or any other finite intellect can
discover.
Darwin asks rather
large concessions. You must begin by giving him thousands of millions of
millions of years (that Johnny Strong would be puzzled to read were they
expressed in Arabic numerals) for the operation of his Law of Progress, and
admit that the silence of the stratified record of those ages as to its
operation and existence may be explained away; and then, the want of
affirmative evidence to sustain his theory being accounted for, he can make out
a plausible case for it by suggesting that “it may have been’’; “why should
not’’; “we may suppose that,” and the like.
The period required
for the production of the whole animal world from a single parent stock (and he
holds that both the animal and vegetable races have one common primeval parent,
a diatom, I suppose) by the working of his imaginary law of natural selection
is even beyond the all but inconceivable procession of ages which he concedes
that his theory calls for. Let us see. We have records of the condition of
animal life in certain of its departments that go back to the earliest picture
writing of Egypt and become more and more abundant and minute as they approach
our own days. Those of the last two hundred years are copious and elaborate.
During the last fifty, a mass of evidence has been collected that could hardly
be read through in one lifetime. The superficial area covered by investigations
thus recorded in our own day is immensely great; that is, 25,000 miles of
European coast line alone, studied almost inch by inch, every zoological
province of all the earth’s surface investigated (though, of course, not
exhaustively) by inquisitive travelers and men of science. Practical men,
stimulated by hope of profit in money, have been working hard and intelligently
to modify existing breeds or species by changing all their original or natural
relations to climate, food, and habit, and perpetuating as far as they could
every improvement in the breed artificially or accidentally produced. But no
symptom of the change of one species to another has been produced or has
occurred within the historic period. There is not even a legend of the ancient
identity of lion and eagle, no tradition of a period before horse and ass;
geese and ducks were distinct animals. No development of new organs or new
functions by any animal is anywhere recorded or traceable. Scientific breeders
after centuries of vigilant work have produced various types of horse, sheep,
pigeon, and so forth; but these several types lose their respective peculiarities,
unless their purity be carefully maintained. (Note Darwin’s statement about the
tendency of peculiarities of the rock pigeon, the original progenitor, to recur
in the fancy breeds, pouter and tumbler and so forth.) The area covered by
scientific research and by experiments in breeding for the last century is
equivalent (in considering Darwin’s theory) to scores of thousands of years of
recorded observation in a single district. But however this may be, man’s experience
for, we will say, only four thousand years furnishes no instance of the
development of new functions or new organs by any animal or vegetable organism.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins
and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong,
Vol. 3, p. 10-11
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