AiouST 17, 18S3.] 



SCIENCE. 



l!)o 



lie very properly aiUls, ' Please to recollect, however, 

 that this is a mere speciihilion.' He trusts, however, 

 tliat sucli speculations are 'not witliout their use;' 

 but this will depend upon whether or not they lead 

 men's minds from the path of legitimate science into 

 the quiclvsands of baseless conjecture. 



Gaudry, in his recent work, ' Enchainements du 

 nioiide animal,' ' thouy;h a strong advocate of evolu- 

 tion, is obliged in his final riswne to say, " 11 ne 

 laisse point percer le mystere qui entoure le deve- 

 loppeinent primilif des grandes classes du nionde 

 animal. Nul homme ne sait coninieiit out etc formes 

 Ics premiers individus de foraminiferes, de polypes, 

 d'e'toiles de mer, de crinoides, etc. Les fossiles pri- 

 niaires ne nous out p.as encore fourni de preuves 

 positives du passage des animaux d'uue classe a ceux 

 d'une autre classe." 



Professor Williamson of Manchester, in an address 

 delivered in February last before the Koyal institu- 

 tion of Great Britain, after showing that the conifers, 

 ferns, and lycopods of the paleozoic have no known 

 ancestry, uses the significant words, " The time has 

 not yet arrived for the appointment of a botanical 

 king-atarms and constructor of pedigrees." 



Another caution which a paleontologist has occa- 

 sion to give with regard to theories of life has ref- 

 erence to the tendency of biologists to iufer that 

 animals and plants were introduced under embryonic 

 forms, and at first in few and imperfect species. 

 Facts do not substantiate this. The first appearance 

 of leading types of life is rarely embryonic. On the 

 contrary, they often appear in highly perfect and 

 specialized forms; often, however, of composite type, 

 and expressing characters afterwards so separated as 

 to belong to higher groups. The trilobites of the 

 Cambrian are some of them of few segments, and, so 

 far, embryonic; but the greater part are many-seg- 

 mented and very complex. The batracliians of the 

 carboniferous present many characters higher than 

 those of their modern successors, and now appropri- 

 ated to the true reptiles. The reptiles of the Per- 

 mian and trias usvirped some of the prerogatives of 

 the mammals. The ferns, lycopods, and equisetums 

 of the Devonian and carboniferous were, to say the 

 least, not inferior to their modern representatives. 

 The shell-bearing cephalopods of the paleozoic would 

 seem to have possessed structures now special to a 

 higher group, that of the cuttle-fishes. The bald and 

 cintemptuo\is negation of these facts by Ilaeckel 

 and other bii)logists does not tend to give geologists 

 much confidence in their dicta. 



Again: we are now prepared to say that the strug- 

 gle for existence, however plausible as a theory, 

 when put before us in connection with the produc- 

 tiveness of atiimals, and the few survivors of their 

 multitudinous progeny, has not been the determin- 

 ing cause of the introduction of new species. The 

 periods of rapid introduction of new forms of marine 

 life were not periods of strugsle. but of expansion, — 

 those periods in which the submergence of continents 

 afforded new and large space for their extension 

 and comfortable subsistence. In like manner it was 

 > l-uria, 1883. 



continental emergence that afTorded the opportunity 

 for the inlroiluction of lan<l animals and jilants. 

 Further, in coiuie<>ti(m with this, it is now an estab- 

 lished conclusion, that the great aggressive faunas 

 and floras of the continents have originated in the 

 north, some of them within the arctic circle; and this 

 in periods of exceptional warmth, when the perpetual 

 summer sunshine of the arctic regions co-existed with 

 a warm temperature. The testimony of the rocks 

 thus is, that not struggle, but expansion, furnished 

 the requisite conditions for new forms of life, and 

 that the periods of struggle were characterized by 

 depauperation and extinction. 



But we are sometimes told that organisms are 

 merely mechanical, and that the discussions respect- 

 ing their origin have no significance, any more than 

 if they related to rocks or crystals, because they re- 

 late merely to the organism considered as a machine, 

 and not to that which may be supposed to be more 

 important; namely, the great determining power of 

 mind and will. That this is a mere evasion, by 

 which we really gain nothing, will appear from a 

 characteristic extract of an article by an eminent 

 biologist, in the new edition of the Encyclopedia 

 Britannica, — a publication which, I am sorry to say, 

 instead of its proper role as a repertory of facts, has 

 become a strong partisan, stating extreme and un- 

 proved speculations as if they were conclusions of 

 science. The statement referred to is as follows: 

 " A mass of living protoplasm is simply a molecular 

 machine of gicat complexity, the total retults of the 

 working of which, or its vital phenomen i, depend 

 on the one hand on its construction, and, on the 

 other. On the energy supplied to it; and to speak of 

 vitality as any thing but the name for a series of 

 operations is as if one should talk of the horologity 

 of a clock." It would, I think, scarcely be possible 

 to put into the same number of words a greater 

 amount of unscienlilic assumption and unproved 

 statement than in this sentence. Is ' living proto- 

 plasm' different in any way from dead protoplasm, 

 and, if so, wh.at causes the difiference;' What is a 

 'machine' ;' Can we conceive of a self-produced or 

 uncaused machine, or one not intended to work out 

 some definite results? The results of the machine 

 in question are said to be 'vital phenomena;' cer- 

 tainly most wonderful results, aiul greater than those 

 of any machine man has yet been able to construct. 

 But why 'vital'? If there is no such thing as life, 

 surely they are merely physical results. Can me- 

 chanical causes produce other than physical effects? 

 To Aristotle, life was ' the cause of form in organ- 

 isms.' Is not this quite as likely to be true as the 

 converse proposiiicm ? If the vital phenomena de- 

 ]ieiid on the 'construction' of the machine, and the 

 ' energy supplied to it,' whence this construction, and 

 whence this energy? The illustration of the clock 

 does not help us to answer this question. The con- 

 struction of the clock depends on its maker, and its 

 enercy is derived from the hand that winds it up. 

 If we can think of a clock which no one ha.s m.ade 

 and which no one winds, — a clock constructed by 

 chance, set in harmony with the universe by chance, 



