74 



♦ KNO^A^LEDGE ♦ 



[February 1, 1887. 



mutterings, as it were) — or whon we invite them to give 

 their suffrage since tliey have suffered and it is they who 

 will have to suffer, then our boasted freedom is only— says 

 the peer poet — 



Free to slay herself ; is dying while they shout her name. 

 Assuredly the extension of the suffrage is not an un- 

 mixed good. Let the fault lie where it may, a large pro- 

 portion of those to whom votes have recently been given are 

 quite incapable of formijig just opinions on the matters 

 about which they are called on to vote. (Many ai-e not more 

 capable, though, who think themselves born legislators, and 

 are really but several different sorts of born noodles.) Yet 

 it was at any rate an attempt at justice — feeble and late, 

 but still an attempt — to give our peasants a voice after 

 borrowing from many of them their lives generation after 

 generation, and from most of them all that makes life worth 

 living. Nor need those fear who would have the labourers 

 in our fields remain as simple and as stupid as of yore. It 

 is to be feared the poor fellows will not soon learn better. 

 Fifty years hence it will still be possible to say what 

 Carlyle said of them fifty years ago, when he pictured the 

 British village Dumdrudge, contemplating in place of 

 thirty brisk useful peasants as many dead carcasses for 

 which " it must anew shed tears." " Had these men " — 

 these thirty and the thirty Russian.s slain per contra — 

 " any quan-el % Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest I They 

 lived far enough apart ; were the entii-est strangers ; nay, 

 in so wide a universe, there was even unconsciously, by 

 commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How 

 then ? Simpleton 1 their governors had fallen out ; and 

 instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make 

 these poor blockheads shoot." No fear, old heraldry I 

 Hope on, old history ! And poor old poetry, be joyful 

 once more 1 For many Jubilee seasons yet to come the 

 world will not have to sorrow that — 



The peasant cow should butt the lion passant from his field. 

 The Lion Passant has ever been Guardant too; the Lion 

 Ramjmnt, gules [liuhy though not always blushingly 

 rubescent for peers, and Mars for piinces a-s old heraldry 

 enjoins) will long take care that the peasant cow, aye, and 

 the peasant calf and sheep and lamb, nay, even the poor, 

 trough-wallowing pig, shall duly provide for his noble 

 though somewhat greedy maw. If he is no longer as of 

 yore armed and langued sanguine it is only because teeth 

 and claws and saignant tongue are hidden. Even the 

 Jeremiah of this year of Jubilee will not persuade us that 

 the peasant cow will quickly butt the lordly lion from his 

 fields. 



All this heraldic nonsense, it will be seen, brings in its 

 own reply, almost as nonsensical as itself. If poor old 

 heraldry teaches poor old poetry to call the lords of fields 

 lions, and those who till the fields mere cows, the answer, 

 fitting the foolish saying, speaks rightly of such lords as 

 having the brutal, rapacious, and carnivorous qualities of 

 that keen-toothed, strong-clawed beast of prey. In the old 

 days, when the fighting men who became lords of the land 

 chose savage brutes for their knightly cognizances, savagery 

 and brutality were not regarded as undesirable qualities; 

 and probably most of these gallant ruffians, from my lion- 

 hearted namesake downwards, deserved their titles as 

 thoroughly as Chingachgook deserved to be called The Big 

 Snake. But it is otherwise now ; and poets, even poets 

 laureate, might be better employed than in attributing to 

 landowners the brutal qualities which of yore were essential 

 ■ — as the fate of all mild lords and princes showed — to the 

 lengthy tenure of war-captured land. The fault is not 

 amended by going outside that poor old heraldry to call our 

 labourers " peasant cows." 



THE STORY OF CREATION. 



A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF EVOLUTION. 



By Edward Clodd. 



Cir AFTER III.- 



PART II. 

 -THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS. 



OISTURE as well as heat is essential to life ; 

 therefore life had its beginnings in water, 

 but whether as plant or animal is a diflicult 

 question to answer. The fossil-yielding 

 rocks tell us nothing about it, and the lowest 

 and simplest plants and animals have so 

 much in common that any attempt to gather 

 evidence from them as to the priority of their respective 

 ancestors must fail. But, however closely the earliest life- 

 forms were related, there is fundamental difference to be 

 drawn between their successors in the mode of nutrition, a 

 difference which may throw some light upon this problem 

 of priority, and which is not effaced by the existence of 

 certain flesh-eating plants and vegetating animals, since this 

 witnesses to the interchange of modifications of which pro- 

 toplasm is capable. 



The plant alone has the power to convert the elements of 

 lifeless matter into the living solid state, thereby storing up 

 energy for its own use in growth and germination, and for 

 the use, directly or indirectly, of the animal. This the plant 

 is enabled to do in vii-tue of its green colouring matter, called 

 chlorophyll, which absorbs certain sun-rays, and sets up 

 chemical action by which carbon is separated from oxygen in 

 carbonic acid gas, and hydrogen from oxygen in water, 

 forming hydro-carbons in which energy is stored up. Now if 

 the animal is entirely dependent upon the plants for this 

 energj', it would seem clear that they were the fii'st to be 

 developed. 



Mr. Grant Allen has marshalled the arguments in sup- 

 port of their priority, drawn from the foregoing facts, in 

 a paper of great force and clearness, which has apparently 

 received but scant attention from biologists.* He submits 

 that as the solar i-ays are, in the absence of chlorophyll, 

 powerless to set up the separative action resulting in the 

 material on which alone life can be sustained, the inference 

 is obvious — no chlorophyll, no life. In other words, life 

 being due to energy radiated from the sun, which energy is 

 inoperative without chlorophyll, protoplasm ^;^<«s chlorophyll 

 is the physical basis of life. 



Against this we have the opinion of authorities of the 

 rank of Professors Ray Lankester among zoologists, and 

 Thiselton Dyer among botanists, that the earliest protoplasm 

 was destitute of chlorophyll. They contend that since 

 chlorophyll is a modification of certain parts of the proto- 

 pl.asmic cells, it is not a thing of primary origin, but a later 

 acquirement slowly attained. Both authorities incline to 

 regard certain forms of fungi as representing " more closely 

 than any other living forma the original ancestors of the 

 whole organic world "f . . . " which existed before plants 

 possessed chlorophyll at all." J But fungi, as Mr. Dyer 

 admits, "draw their nutriment from compounds derived from 

 other organisms, and therefore in a higher state of aggrega- 

 tion than those the green plants make use of, so far 

 approaching animals in the mode of their nutrition." 

 That is to say, fungoids are like animals ; they use up the 

 energy which the plants accumulate, and fill a secondary 

 place in the succession of life-forms. The strength of Mr. 



* Genthman's Magazine, Jane 1885, " Genesis." 

 t Encyclnp. Brit., Art. " Protozoa, p. 832. 



J Ihid., " Biology," p. 691. Cf. also Professor Huxley's Critique 

 and Addresses, p. 239. 



