The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 Part 22

_IV.--An Ideal Old Age_

As I have shown in the "Nature of Man," the human const.i.tution as it exists to-day, being the result of a long evolution and containing a large animal element, cannot furnish the basis of rational morality. The conception which has come down from antiquity to modern times, of a harmonious activity of all the organs, is no longer appropriate to mankind. Organs which are in course of atrophy must not be re-awakened, and many natural characters which, perhaps, were useful in the case of animals, must be made to disappear in men.

Human nature which, like the const.i.tutions of other organisms, is subject to evolution, must be modified according to a definite ideal.

Just as a gardener or stock-raiser is not content with the existing nature of the plants and animals with which he is occupied, but modifies them to suit his purposes, so also the scientific philosopher must not think of existing human nature as immutable, but must try to modify it for the advantage of mankind. As bread is the chief article in the human food, attempts to improve cereals have been made for a very long time, but in order to obtain results much knowledge is necessary. To modify the nature of plants, it is necessary to understand them well, and it is necessary to have an ideal to be aimed at. In the case of mankind the ideal of human nature, towards which we ought to press, may be formed.

In my opinion this ideal is "orthobiosis"--that is to say, the development of human life, so that it pa.s.ses through a long period of old age in active and vigorous health, leading to a final period in which there shall be present a sense of satiety of life, and a wish for death.

Just as we must study the nature of plants before trying to realise our ideal, so also varied and profound knowledge is the first requisite for the ideal of moral conduct. It is necessary not only to know the structure and functions of the human organism, but to have exact ideas on human life as it is in society. Scientific knowledge is so indispensable for moral conduct that ignorance must be placed among the most immoral acts. A mother who rears her child in defiance of good hygiene, from want of knowledge, is acting immorally towards her offspring, notwithstanding her feeling of sympathy. And this also is true of a government which remains in ignorance of the laws which regulate human life and human society.

If the human race come to adopt the principles of orthobiosis, a considerable change in the qualities of men of different ages will follow. Old age will be postponed so much that men of from sixty to seventy years of age will retain their vigour, and will not require to ask a.s.sistance in the fashion now necessary. On the other hand, young men of twenty-one years of age will no longer be thought mature or ready to fulfil functions so difficult as taking a share in public affairs.

The view which I set forth in the "Nature of Man" regarding the danger which comes from the present interference of young men in political affairs has since then been confirmed in the most striking fashion.

It is easily intelligible that in the new conditions such modern idols as universal suffrage, public opinion, and the _referendum_, in which the ignorant ma.s.ses are called on to decide questions which demand varied and profound knowledge, will last no longer than the old idols.

The progress of human knowledge will bring about the replacement of such inst.i.tutions by others, in which applied morality will be controlled by the really competent persons. I permit myself to suppose that in these times scientific training will be much more general than it is just now, and that it will occupy the place which it deserves in education and in life.

Our intelligence informs us that man is capable of much, and, therefore, we hope that he may be able to modify his own nature and transform his disharmonies into harmonies. It is only human will that can attain this ideal.

HUGH MILLER

The Old Red Sandstone

Hugh Miller was born in Cromarty, in the North of Scotland, October 10, 1802. From the time he was seventeen until he was thirty-four, he worked as a common stone-mason, although devoting his leisure hours to independent researches in natural history, for which he formed a taste early in life. He became interested in journalism, and was editor of the Edinburgh "Witness," when, in 1840, he published the contents of the volume issued a year later as "The Old Red Sandstone." The book deals with its author's most distinctive work, namely, finding fossils that tell much of the history of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and fixing in the geological scale the place to which the larger beds of remains found in the system belong. Besides being a practical and original geologist, Miller had a fine imaginative power, which enabled him to reconstruct the past from its ruinous relics. The fact that he unfortunately set himself the task of combating the theory of evolution, which was fast gaining ground in his day, should not blind us to the high value of his geological experiences. The results of his observations provide some of the most cogent proofs of the theory he disputed. Late in life Miller's mind gave way, and he put an end to his own life on December 24, 1856.

_I.--A Stone-mason's Researches_

My advice to young working men desirous of bettering their circ.u.mstances, and adding to the amount of their enjoyment, is to seek happiness in study. Learn to make a right use of your eyes; the commonest things are worth looking at--even stones, weeds, and the most familiar animals. There are none of the intellectual or moral faculties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station.

Twenty years ago I made my first acquaintance with a life of labour and restraint. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work in a quarry. I was going to exchange all my day-dreams for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

That first day was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother-workmen. That night, arising out of my employment, I found I had food enough for thought without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labour.

In the course of the day I picked up a nodular ma.s.s of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture, one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance, and found that there might be. In one of these there were what seemed to be scales of fishes and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood.

Of all nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them that there was a part of the sh.o.r.e, about two miles further to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up, and that in his father's day the country people called them thunderbolts. Our first half-holiday I employed in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied even in my dreams.

My first year of labour came to a close, and I found that the amount of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My knowledge had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons; and as I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, I had fitted myself for independence.

My curiosity, once fully awakened, remained awake, and my opportunities of gratifying it have been tolerably ample. I have been an explorer of caves and ravines, a loiterer along sea-sh.o.r.es, a climber among rocks, a labourer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one. I remember pa.s.sing direct, on one occasion, from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Midlothian, the Mountain Limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach of the Moray Firth. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granite and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the sh.e.l.ls and lignites of the oolite; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reds and tree ferns of the carboniferous period.

I advise the stone-mason to acquaint himself with geology. Much of his time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely separated localities, and so, in the course of a few years he may pa.s.s over the whole geological scale, and this, too, with opportunities of observation at every stage which can be shared with him by only the gentleman of fortune who devotes his whole time to study. Nay, in some respects, his advantages are superior to those of the amateur, for the man whose employments have to be carried on in the same formation for months, perhaps years, enjoys better opportunities of arriving at just conclusions. There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer, and the proofs which establish their place in the geological scale more tardily still. I was acquainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere I ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous; I was acquainted with it for nearly ten years more ere I could a.s.sign its fossils to their exact place in the scale. Nature is vast and knowledge limited, and no individual need despair of adding to the general fund.

_II.--Bridging Life's Gaps_

"The Old Red Sandstone," says a Scottish geologist in a digest of some recent geological discoveries, "has. .h.i.therto been considered as remarkably barren of fossils." Only a few years have gone by since men of no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this formation--or system, rather, for it contains at least three distinct formations. There are some of our British geologists who still regard it as a sort of debatable tract, ent.i.tled to no independent status, a sort of common which should be divided.

It will be found, however, that this. .h.i.therto neglected system yields in importance to none of the others, whether we take into account its amazing depth, the great extent to which it is developed both at home and abroad, the interesting links which it furnishes in the geological scale, or the vast period of time which it represents. There are localities in which the depth of the Old Red Sandstone fully equals the elevation of Mount Etna over the level of the sea, and in which it contains three distinct groups of organic remains, the one rising in beautiful progression over the other.

My first statement regarding the system must be much the reverse of the one just quoted, for the fossils are remarkably numerous and in a state of high preservation. I have a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the truth of the a.s.sertion within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; and certainly a stranger a.s.semblage of forms has rarely been grouped together--creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, which puzzle the naturalist to a.s.sign them even to their cla.s.s; boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; fish, plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully j.a.panned; the tail in every instance among the less equivocal shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side--the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.

Lamarck, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders of being towards the superior, and that the offspring of creatures low in the scale may belong to a different and n.o.bler species a few thousand years hence. Never was there a fancy so wild and extravagant. The principle of adaptation still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog. It is true that it is a law of nature that the chain of being is in some degree a continuous chain, and the various cla.s.ses of existence shade into each other. All the animal families have their connecting links. Geology abounds with creatures of the intermediate cla.s.s.

Fishes seem to have been the master existences of two great geological systems, mayhap of three, ere the age of reptiles began. Now, fishes differ very much among themselves, some ranking nearly as low as worms, some nearly as high as reptiles; and we find in the Old Red Sandstone series of links which are wanting in the present creation, and the absence of which occasions a wide gap between the two grand divisions of fishes, the bony and the cartilaginous.

Of all the organisms of the system one of the most extraordinary is the pterichthys, or winged fish, which the writer had the pleasure of introducing to the acquaintance of geologists. Had Lamarck been the discoverer he would unquestionably have held that he had caught a fish almost in the act of wishing itself into a bird. There are wings which want only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for pa.s.sing through the air as through water, and a tail with which to steer.

My first idea regarding it was that I had discovered a connecting link-between the tortoise and the fish. I submitted some of my specimens to Mr. Murchison, and they furnished him with additional data by which to construct the calculations he was then making respecting fossils, and they added a new and very singular link to the chain of existence in its relation to human knowledge. Aga.s.siz confirmed the conclusions of Murchison in almost every particular, deciding at once that the creature must have been a fish.

Next to the pterichthys of the Lower Old Red Sandstone I shall place its contemporary the coccosteus of Aga.s.siz--a fish which in some respects must have resembled it. Both were covered with an armour of thickly tubercled bony plates, and both furnished with a vertebrated tail. The coccosteus seems to have been most abundant. Another of the families of the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone--the cephalaspis--seems almost to const.i.tute a connecting link between fishes and crustaceans.

In the present creation fishes are either osseous or cartilaginous, that is, with bony skeletons, or with a framework of elastic, semi-transparent animal matter, like the shark; and the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone unite these characteristics, resembling in some respects the osseous and in others the cartilaginous tribes. Aga.s.siz at once confirmed my suspicion that the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone were intermediate. Though it required skill to determine the place of the pterichthys and coccosteus there could be no mistaking the osteolepis--it must have been a fish, and a handsome one, too. But while its head resembled the heads of the bony fishes, its tail differed in no respects from the tails of the cartilaginous ones. And so through the discovery of extinct species the gaps between existing species have been bridged.

_III.--Place-Fixing in the Dim Past_

The next step was to fix the exact place of the ichthyolites in the geological scale, and this I was enabled to do by finding a large and complete bed _in situ_. Its true place is a little more than a hundred feet above the top, and not much more than a hundred yards above the base of the great conglomerate.

The Old Red Sandstone in Scotland and in England has its lower, middle, and upper groups--three distinct formations. As the pterichthys and coccosteus are the characteristic ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red formation, so the cephalaspis distinguishes the middle or coronstone division of the system in England. When we pa.s.s to the upper formation, we find the holoptychius the most characteristic fossil.

These fossils are found in a degree of entireness which depends less on their age than on the nature of the rock in which they occur. Limestone is the preserving salt of the geological world, and the conservative qualities of the shales and stratified clays of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are not much inferior to limestone itself; while in the Upper Old Red the beds of consolidated sand are much less conservative of organic remains. The older fossils, therefore, can be described almost as minutely as the existence of the present creation, whereas the newer fossils exist, except in a few rare cases, as fragments, and demand the powers of a Cuvier or an Aga.s.siz to restore them to their original combinations. On the other hand, while the organisms of the Lower Old Red are numerous and well preserved, those of the Upper Old Red are much greater in individual size. In short, the fish of the lower ocean must have ranged in size between a stickleback and a cod; whereas some of the fish of the ocean of the Upper Sandstone were covered with scales as large as oyster sh.e.l.ls, and were armed with teeth that rivalled in size those of the crocodile.

_IV.--Fish as Nature's Last Word_

I will now attempt to present to the reader the Old Red Sandstone as it existed in time--during the succeeding periods of its formation, and when its existences lived and moved as the denizens of primeval oceans.

We pa.s.s from the cemetery with its heaps of bones to the ancient city full of life and animation in all its streets and dwellings.

Before we commence our picture, two great geological periods have come to their close, and the floor of the widely spread ocean is occupied to the depth of many thousand feet by the remains of bygone existences. The rocks of these two earlier periods are those of the Cambrian and Silurian groups. The lower--Cambrian, representative of the first glimmering twilight of being--must be regarded as a period of uncertainty. It remains for future discoverers to determine regarding the shapes of life that burrowed in its ooze or careered through the inc.u.mbent waters.

There is less doubt respecting the existences of the Silurian rocks.

Four distinct platforms of being range in it, the one over the other, like the stories of a building. Life abounded on all these platforms, and in shapes the most wonderful. In the period of the Upper Silurian fish, properly so called, and of a very perfect organisation, had taken precedence of the crustacean. These most ancient beings of their cla.s.s were cartilaginous fishes, and they appear to have been introduced by myriads. Such are the remains of what seem to have been the first vertebrata.

The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened amid confusion and turmoil. The finely laminated Tilestones of England were deposited evidently in a calm sea. During the contemporary period the s.p.a.ce which now includes Orkney, Lochness, Dingwall, Gamrie, and many a thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains, in a thousand different localities, to testify to the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion, though it is difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea could have been so violently and equally agitated for so greatly extended a s.p.a.ce.

The period of this shallow and stormy ocean pa.s.sed, and the bottom, composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides and tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit of coa.r.s.e sandstone strata, and the subsidence continued until fully ninety feet had overlaid the conglomerate in waters perfectly undisturbed. And here we find the first proof that this ancient ocean literally swarmed with life--that its bottom was covered with miniature forests of algae, and its waters darkened by immense shoals of fish. I have seen the ichthyolite bed where they were as thickly covered with fossil remains as I have ever seen a fishing-bank covered with herrings.

At this period some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as in Cromarty is strewn thick with remains which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. In what could it have originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction could the innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand miles in extent be annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they lived be left undisturbed by its operations? The thought has often struck me that calcined lime, cast out as ashes from some distant crater and carried by the winds, might have been the cause of the widely spread destruction to which the fossil organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by a few troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was removed.

The period of death pa.s.sed, and over the innumerable dead there settled a soft muddy sediment. For an unknown s.p.a.ce of time, represented in the formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of life. A few scales and plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed outside the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it as their numbers increased.

The work of deposition went on and sandstone was overlaid by stratified clay. This upper bed had also its organisms, but the circ.u.mstances were less favourable to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those in which the organisms were wrapped up in their stony coverings. Age followed age, generations were entombed in ever-growing depositions.

Vast periods pa.s.sed, and it seemed as if the power of the Creator had reached its extreme limit when fishes had been called into existence, and our planet was destined to be the dwelling-place of no n.o.bler inhabitants.

The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded on an upper platform by the existences of a later creation. Shoals of cephalaspides, feathered with fins, sweep past. We see the distant gleam of scales, that some of the coats glitter with enamel, that others bristle over with minute th.o.r.n.y points. A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy bottoms, or burrows in the hollows of the banks.

Ages and centuries pa.s.s--who can sum up their number?--for the depth of this middle formation greatly exceeds that of the other two.