A History of Science - v.3 (Williams)

that have been recently discovered, and to the circumstances of their discovery, we shall easily perceive that there is very little chance indeed of our ever finding alive those which have only been seen in a

fossil state.

"Islands of moderate size, and at a considerable distance from the large continents, have very few quadrupeds. These must have been carried to them from

other countries. Cook and Bougainville found no other quadrupeds besides hogs and dogs in the South Sea Islands; and the largest quadruped of the West

India Islands, when first discovered, was the agouti, a species of the cavy, an animal apparently between the rat and the rabbit.

"It is true that the great continents, as Asia, Africa, the two Americas, and New Holland, have large quadrupeds, and, generally speaking, contain species common

to each; insomuch, that upon discovering countries which are isolated from the rest of the world, the animals they contain of the class of quadruped were found entirely different from those which existed in

other countries. Thus, when the Spaniards first penetrated into South America, they did not find it to contain

a single quadruped exactly the same with those of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The puma, the jaguar, the tapir, the capybara, the llama, or glama, and vicuna,

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Cuvier then points out that the ancients were well acquainted with practically all the animals on the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa now known to scientists. He finds little grounds, therefore, for belief in the theory that at one time there were monstrous animals on the earth which it was necessary to destroy

in order that the present fauna and men might flourish. After reviewing these theories and beliefs in detail, he takes up his Inquiry Respecting the Fabulous Animals

of the Ancients. "It is easy," he says, "to reply to the foregoing objections, by examining the descriptions

that are left us by the ancients of those unknown animals,

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We shall have occasion to revert to this part of Cuvier's paper in another connection. Here it suffices to

pass at once to the final conclusion that the fossil bones in question are the remains of an extinct fauna, the like of which has no present-day representation on the

earth. Whatever its implications, this conclusion now seemed to Cuvier to be fully established.

In England the interest thus aroused was sent to fever-heat in 1821 by the discovery of abundant beds

of fossil bones in the stalagmite-covered floor of a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire which went to show that England, too, had once had her share of gigantic beasts.

Dr. Buckland, the incumbent of the chair of geology

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at Oxford, and the most authoritative English geologist of his day, took these finds in hand and showed that the bones belonged to a number of species, including

such alien forms as elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and hyenas. He maintained that all of these

creatures had actually lived in Britain, and that the caves in which their bones were found had been the dens of hyenas.

The claim was hotly disputed, as a matter of course.

As late as 1827 books were published denouncing Buckland, doctor of divinity though he was, as one who had

joined in an "unhallowed cause," and reiterating the old cry that the fossils were only remains of tropical species washed thither by the deluge. That they were found

in solid rocks or in caves offered no difficulty, at least not to the fertile imagination of Granville Penn, the leader of the conservatives, who clung to the old idea

of Woodward and Cattcut that the deluge had dissolved the entire crust of the earth to a paste, into

which the relics now called fossils had settled. The caves, said Mr. Penn, are merely the result of gases given off by the carcasses during decomposition--

great air-bubbles, so to speak, in the pasty mass, becoming caverns when the waters receded and the paste

hardened to rocky consistency.

But these and such-like fanciful views were doomed even in the day of their utterance. Already in 1823

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other gigantic creatures, christened ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus by Conybeare, had been found in deeper strata of British rocks; and these, as well as other monsters whose remains were unearthed in various parts of the world, bore such strange forms that even the

most sceptical could scarcely hope to find their counterparts among living creatures. Cuvier's contention that

all the larger vertebrates of the existing age are known to naturalists was borne out by recent explorations,

and there seemed no refuge from the conclusion that

the fossil records tell of populations actually extinct. But if this were admitted, then Smith's view that there have been successive rotations of population could no longer be denied. Nor could it be in doubt that the successive faunas, whose individual remains have been preserved in myriads, representing extinct species by thousands and tens of thousands, must have required

vast periods of time for the production and growth of their countless generations.

As these facts came to be generally known, and as it came to be understood in addition that the very matrix of the rock in which fossils are imbedded is in

many cases one gigantic fossil, composed of the remains of microscopic forms of life, common-sense,

which, after all, is the final tribunal, came to the aid of belabored science. It was conceded that the only

tenable interpretation of the record in the rocks is that

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numerous populations of creatures, distinct from one another and from present forms, have risen and passed away; and that the geologic ages in which these creatures lived were of inconceivable length. The rank and

file came thus, with the aid of fossil records, to realize the import of an idea which James Hutton, and here and

there another thinker, had conceived with the swift intuition of genius long before the science of paleontology

came into existence. The Huttonian proposition that time is long had been abundantly established,

and by about the close of the first third of the last century geologists had begun to speak of "ages" and "untold aeons of time" with a familiarity which their predecessors had reserved for days and decades.

CHARLES LYELL COMBATS CATASTROPHISM

And now a new question pressed for solution. If the earth has been inhabited by successive populations of beings now extinct, how have all these creatures been destroyed? That question, however, seemed to present no difficulties. It was answered out of hand by the application of an old idea. All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate days." Naturally

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enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to science, rose from

their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also as silent and as thought-provocative, as Sphinx or pyramid. These ancient hosts, it was said, have been exterminated at intervals of odd millions of years by the recurrence of catastrophes of which the Mosaic deluge is

the latest, but perhaps not the last.

This explanation had fullest warrant of scientific authority. Cuvier had prefaced his classical work with

a speculative disquisition whose very title (Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe) is ominous of catastrophism, and whose text fully sustains the augury. And Buckland, Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone even beyond the master, naming

the work in which he described the Kirkdale fossils, Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge.

Both these authorities supposed the creatures whose remains they studied to have perished suddenly in the mighty flood whose awful current, as they supposed, gouged out the modern valleys and hurled great blocks of granite broadcast over the land. And they invoked

similar floods for the extermination of previous populations.

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It is true these scientific citations had met with only qualified approval at the time of their utterance, because then the conservative majority of mankind did

not concede that there had been a plurality of populations or revolutions; but now that the belief in past

geologic ages had ceased to be a heresy, the recurring catastrophes of the great paleontologists were accepted with acclaim. For the moment science and tradition

were at one, and there was a truce to controversy, except indeed in those outlying skirmish-lines of thought whither news from headquarters does not permeate till

it has become ancient history at its source.

The truce, however, was not for long. Hardly had contemporary thought begun to adjust itself to the conception of past ages of incomprehensible extent, each terminated by a catastrophe of the Noachian

type, when a man appeared who made the utterly bewildering assertion that the geological record, instead

of proving numerous catastrophic revolutions in the earth's past history, gives no warrant to the pretensions of any universal catastrophe whatever, near or

remote.

This iconoclast was Charles Lyell, the Scotchman,

who was soon to be famous as the greatest geologist of his time. As a young man he had become imbued with

the force of the Huttonian proposition, that present causes are one with those that produced the past

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changes of the globe, and he carried that idea to what he conceived to be its logical conclusion. To his mind this excluded the thought of catastrophic changes in either inorganic or organic worlds.

But to deny catastrophism was to suggest a revolution in current thought. Needless to say, such revolution could not be effected without a long contest. For

a score of years the matter was argued pro and con., often with most unscientific ardor. A mere outline of the controversy would fill a volume; yet the essential

facts with which Lyell at last established his proposition, in its bearings on the organic world, may be epitomized

in a few words. The evidence which seems to tell

of past revolutions is the apparently sudden change of fossils from one stratum to another of the rocks. But Lyell showed that this change is not always complete. Some species live on from one alleged epoch

into the next. By no means all the contemporaries of the mammoth are extinct, and numerous marine

forms vastly more ancient still have living representatives.

Moreover, the blanks between strata in any particular vertical series are amply filled in with records in the form of thick strata in some geographically distant series. For example, in some regions Silurian rocks are directly overlaid by the coal measures; but elsewhere this sudden break is filled in with the Devonian rocks

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Let us see how Lyell elaborates these ideas, particularly with reference to the rotation of species.[2]

"I have deduced as a corollary," he says, "that the species existing at any particular period must, in the course of ages, become extinct, one after the other. 'They must die out,' to borrow an emphatic expression from Buffon, 'because Time fights against them.' If the views which I have taken are just, there will be no difficulty in explaining why the habitations of so many species are now restrained within exceeding narrow limits. Every local revolution tends to circumscribe the range of some species, while it enlarges that of

others; and if we are led to infer that new species originate in one spot only, each must require time to diffuse

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