Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
of the animal species.
The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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