The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

place. The earth

became with young.

 

In water there are always floating about a multitude of specks

which are usually minute fragments of the soil. But now

appeared certain specks which, though they resembled the

others, possessed certain properties of a very peculiar kind.

First, they brought forth little specks, precise copies of

themselves: they issued their own duplicates. And secondly,

they performed in their own persons an elaborate chemical

operation. Imbibing water and air, they manufactured those

elements with the assistance of the solar rays, into the

compounds of which their own bodies were composed, giving back

to the water those components which they did not require. And

then appeared other little specks which swallowed up the first,

and manufactured them into the compounds more complex still, of

which they, the second comers, were composed. The first were

embryonic plants; the second were embryonic animals. They were

both alike in appearance; both repeated themselves, or

reproduced, in the same manner. The difference between them was

this, that the plants could live on raw air and water, the

animals could live only on those elements when prepared by sun

light in the body of the plant. The office of vegetation upon

the earth is therefore of a culinary nature, and the plant,

when devoured, gives the animal that heat which is its life,

just as coal (a cake of fossil vegetation) gives heat to the

apartment in which it is consumed. But this heat, whether it

lies hidden in the green and growing plant, or in its black and

stony corpse, was at first acquired from the sun. Glorious

Apollo is the parent of us all. Animal heat is solar heat; a

blush is a stray sunbeam; Life is bottled sunshine, and Death

the silent-footed butler who draws out the cork.

 

Those dots of animated jelly, without definite form or figure,

swimming unconsciously in the primeval sea, were the ancestors

of man. The history of our race begins with them, and continues

without an interruption to the present day; a splendid

narrative, the materials of which it is for science to

discover, the glories of which it is for poets to portray.

 

Owing to the action of surrounding forces, the outer parts of

the original jelly-dot became harder and more solid than the

parts within, and so it assumed the shape of the cell or

sphere. Its food consisted of microscopic fragments of

vegetable matter imbibed through its surface or outer rind,

such portions as were not “made up” being expelled or excreted

in the same manner as they were taken in. There was no

difference of parts, except that the outside was solid and the

inside soft. The creature’s body was its hand, its stomach, and

its mouth. When it had lived a certain time it burst and died,

liberating, as it did so, a brood of cells which had slowly

ripened within. But sometimes these new cells, instead of being

detached when they were born, remained cohering to the parent

cell, thus making the animal consist of several cells instead

of only one. In the first case the process is termed

reproduction; in the second case it is termed growth. But the

two operations are in reality the same. Growth is coherent

reproduction; reproduction is detached growth.

 

Time goes on. Our animal is now a cell-republic enclosed by a

wrapper of solidified and altered cells. Next, in this wrapper

a further change takes place. It protrudes into limbs; a gaping

month appears. The limbs or tentacles grasp the food and put it

within the mouth; other limbs sprout forth and carry their

owner from place to place. In the meantime the cells within are

also changed; their partitions are removed; the many-walled

apartments are converted into galleries or tubes, along which

the food is conveyed from one part of the body to another.

These tubes are filled with blood, pumped backwards and

forwards by the heart. The muscles which move the outer limbs

are equipped with nerves, the movements of which are directed

from centres in the spine and brain. The functions of life are

thus divided, and each department has an organ of its own. The

reproductive function is divided farther still. Two separate

elements are formed; one prepares and ejects the sperm-cell

which the other receives, and unites to the germ-cell. At a

later period in the history of life this arrangement is

supplanted by another, more complicated still. The two elements

no longer co-exist in the same form, and thus reproduction can

only be effected by means of co-operation between two distinct

and independent individuals. How important a fact is this will

presently appear.

 

These various inventions of Nature, so far as we have gone; the

limbs of locomotion and prehension; the heart with its vessels;

the brain with its nerves; and the separation of the sexes, all

occurred in the marine period of the earth’s life: in the dark

deep sea womb.

 

Similar changes, but inferior in degree, occurred in the

vegetable world. The shapeless specks became one-celled: they

were next strung together like a chain of beads; they then grew

into seaweed and aqueous plants, which floated about, and

finally obtained a footing on the land. But they dwelt long

ages on the earth before their sex appeared. There were no

flowers in that primeval world, for the flower is a sign of

love. Gigantic mosses and tree ferns clothed the earth, and

reproduced themselves by scattering cells around.

 

Animals followed their prey, the plants, from the water to the

land and became adapted for terrestrial life. At that period

the atmosphere was thickened with carbonic acid gas, and was

more pestilential than the Black Hole of Calcutta. Only

reptiles, with sluggish and imperfect respiratory organs, could

breathe in such an air. But that fatal gas was bread to the

vegetable world, which took the carbon into its body, and thus

the atmosphere was purified in time. The vast masses of carbon

which the plants took out of the air in order to allow a higher

class of animal to appear upon the stage, were buried in the

earth, hardened into coal, and were brought in by the Author in

the second act — now on.

 

The coal-matter being thus removed, the air was bright and

pure; the sun glowed with radiance and force; the reptiles were

converted into birds and quadrupeds of many kinds; insects

rising from the land and from the water hummed and sparkled in

the air; the forests were adorned with flowers, and cheered

with song. And as the periods rolled on, the inhabitants of the

earth became more complex in their structure, more symmetrical

in form, and more advanced in mental power, till at last the

future lord of the planet himself appeared upon the stage. The

first act of the drama is here concluded: but the division is

merely artificial; in Nature there is no entr’acte; no curtain

falls. Her scenes resemble dissolving views; the lower animals

pass into man by soft, slow, insensible gradations.

 

We must now consider the question, How and why have these

marvellous changes taken place? How and why did the primeval

jelly-dots assume the form of the cell or sphere?

 

It has been already shown that continual changes occurred in

the primeval atmosphere and in the primeval sea. These changes

acting upon animal life produced changes in its composition.

For as animals are the result and expression of the conditions

under which they are born, it is natural to suppose that when

these conditions are changed, the animals should also change.

When the conditions of life are abruptly altered and

instantaneously transformed, the animals are of course

destroyed; but when, as is usually the case, the changes are

gradual, the animals are slowly modified into harmony with the

neighbouring conditions. The primeval speck of life being acted

upon by a variety of forces, became varied in its structure and

as these forces varied from period to period, the organisms

also varied. Complexity of parts results from complexity of

environment. Multiformity of circumstance produces multiformity

of species. The development of animal life from the homogeneous

to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex, from

uniformity to multiformity, is caused by the development of the

earth itself from a monotonous water-covered globe with one

aspect, one constitution, and one temperature to this varied

earth on which we dwell, where each foot of land differs in

some respect from the one beside it. The modifications on

modifications of the animal are due to the modifications on

modifications of the medium in which and on which it lived. And

this operation of Nature is hastened and facilitated by a law

which in itself is murderous and cruel. The earth is overpopulated upon principle. Of the animals that are born, a few

only can survive. There is not enough food for all; Nature

scrambles what there is among the crowd. If any animal

possesses an advantage, however slight, over those with whom he

competes in this food-scramble or struggle for existence, he

will certainly survive; and if he survives, then some one else,

so gentle Nature orders it, must die. This law of competition

becomes itself a force by developing slight variations along

lines of utility into widely different and specific forms.

 

But how is it that animals of the higher type prevail? Why

should species, with a tendency towards a complicated

structure, generally triumph over simple forms? The reason

appears to be this, that whenever a change takes place, it is

almost invariably a change towards complexity. Now it is an

ascertained law that animals are invigorated by a slight

change; they are therefore improved by an approach towards

complexity. Let us take the most mysterious of all progressive

operations — the division of the sexes. The hermaphrodite can

fertilise itself, but its organs are so arranged that it can be

fertilised by another individual, the wind or the water acting

as the go-between. The offspring of such separate unions are

always more vigorous than the home-born progeny of the

hermaphrodite. The latter are therefore killed off by means of

the struggle for existence, and sexual union, at first the

exception, becomes the rule. Just as a body of artisans can do

more work and better work when each man devotes his whole life

to a single department of the craft, so it is good for the

animal that division of labour should be established in its

structure; that instead of the creature being its own mouth,

its own stomach, its own organ of excretion, reproduction, and

locomotion, it should be divided into separate parts, one of

which moves it, another part takes the food, another part

chews, another part digests, another part prepares the blood,

another part pumps the blood to and fro, another part

reproduces the species, another part nourishes the young, while

over all presides the brain.

 

But how is it that some animals have progressed while others

have remained at the bottom of the scale, and others again have

advanced only to a certain point? If all have grown out of such

specks of animated jelly as are still to be found within the

sea, how is it that some have remained throughout infinite

periods of time unchanged; that others have remained in the

form of the sponge, rooted upon rocks; that others, like the

lobster, have never exchanged their jointed bodies for the more

perfect skeleton of the fish; that some fish have taken to the

land, and have been converted into reptiles, and then into

birds or quadrupeds, while others have remained in the aqueous

condition; and lastly, that one animal, namely Man, has

contrived to distance all the others when, as it is

acknowledged, they all started fair?

 

In reply, let me ask those who admit the development of all

civilised people from the savage