Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationChambers, Robert
Science
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Chambers, Robert
Creation; Evolution (Biology)
stage is then reached between the two sexes, which in this species is
designed to be the perfect condition of a large portion of the community.
Four days more make it a perfect male. It is at the same time to be
observed that there is, from the period of oviposition, a destined
distinction between the sexes of the young bees. The queen lays the
whole of the eggs which are designed to become workers, before she begins
to lay those which become males. But probably the condition of her
reproductive system governs the matter of sex, for it is remarked that
when her impregnation is delayed beyond the twenty-eighth day of her
entire existence, she lays only eggs which become males.
We have here, it will be admitted, a most remarkable illustration of the
principle of development, although in an operation limited to the
production of sex only. Let it not be said that the phenomena concerned
in the generation of bees may be very different from those concerned in
the reproduction of the higher animals. There is a unity throughout
nature which makes the one case an instructive reflection of the other.
We shall now see an instance of development operating within the
production of what approaches to the character of variety of species. It
is fully established that a human family, tribe, or nation, is liable, in
the course of generations, to be either advanced from a mean form to a
higher one, or degraded from a higher to a lower, by the influence of the
physical conditions in which it lives. The coarse features, and other
structural peculiarities of the negro race only continue while these
people live amidst the circumstances usually associated with barbarism.
In a more temperate clime, and higher social state, the face and figure
become greatly refined. The few African nations which possess any
civilization also exhibit forms approaching the European; and when the
same people in the United States of America have enjoyed a within-door
life for several generations, they assimilate to the whites amongst whom
they live. On the other hand, there are authentic instances of a people
originally well-formed and good-looking, being brought, by imperfect diet
and a variety of physical hardships, to a meaner form. It is remarkable
that prominence of the jaws, a recession and diminution of the cranium,
and an elongation and attenuation of the limbs, are peculiarities always
produced by these miserable conditions, for they indicate an unequivocal
retrogression towards the type of the lower animals. Thus we see nature
alike willing to go back and to go forward. Both effects are simply the
result of the operation of the law of development in the generative
system. Give good conditions, it advances; bad ones, it recedes. Now,
perhaps, it is only because there is no longer a possibility, in the
higher types of being, of giving sufficiently favourable conditions to
carry on species to species, that we see the operation of the law so far
limited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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