The Story of the Earth and ManDawson, John William, Sir
Science
The Story of the Earth and Man
Dawson, John William, Sir
Human beings -- Origin; Paleontology
But while Eozoon thus preaches of progress and of development, it has
a tale to tell of unity and sameness Just as Eozoon lived in the
Laurentian sea, and was preserved for us by the infiltration of its
canals with siliceous mineral matters, so its successors and
representatives have gone on through all the ages accumulating
limestone in the sea bottom. To-day they are as active as they were
then, and are being fossilised in the same way. The English chalk and
the chalky modern mud of the Atlantic sea-bed, are precisely similar
in origin to the Eozoic limestones. There is also a strange
parallelism in the fact that in the modern seas Foraminifera can live
under conditions of deprivation of light and vital air, and of
enormous pressure, under which few organisms of greater complexity
could exist, and that in like manner Eozoon could live in seas which
were perhaps as yet unfit for most other forms of life.
It has been attempted to press the Eozoic Foraminifers into the
service of those theories of evolution which would deduce the animals
of one geological period by descent with modification from those of
another; but it must be confessed that Eozoon proves somewhat
intractable in this connection. In the first place, the creature is
the grandest of his class, both in form and structure; and if, on the
hypothesis of derivation, it has required the whole lapse of
geological time to disintegrate Eozoon into Orbulina, Globigerina,
and other comparatively simple Foraminifers of the modern seas, it may
have taken as long, probably much longer, to develop Eozoon from such
simple forms in antecedent periods. Time fails for such a process.
Again, the deep sea has been the abode of Foraminifers from the first.
In this deep sea they have continued to live without improvement, and
with little material change. How little likely is it that in less
congenial abodes they could have improved into higher grades of being;
especially since we know that the result in actual fact of any such
struggle for existence is merely the production of depauperated
Foraminifers? Further, there is no link of connection known to us
between Eozoon and any of the animals of the succeeding Primordial,
which are nearly all essentially new types, vastly more different from
Eozoon then it is from many modern creatures. Any such connection is
altogether imaginary and unsupported by proof. The laws of creation
actually illustrated by this primeval animal are only these: First,
that there has been a progress in creation from few, low, and
generalised types of life to more numerous, higher, and more
specialised types; and secondly, that every type, low or high, was
introduced at first in its best and highest form, and was, as a type,
subject to degeneracy, and to partial or total replacement by higher
types subsequently introduced. I do not mean that we could learn all
this from Eozoon alone; but that, rightly considered, it illustrates
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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