The Foot-prints of the Creator : $b or, The Asterolepis of Stromness
John Stuart Mill · en
the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms
lie piled up, “heaps upon heaps,” before it.
There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which this special
scheme of development does not agree. To every truth, too, really such,
from which the antagonist scheme derives its shadowy analogies, it leaves
its full value. It has no quarrel with the facts of even the “Vestiges,”
in their character as realities. There is certainly something very
extraordinary in that fœtal progress of the human brain on which the
assertors of the development hypothesis have founded so much. Nature, in
constructing this curious organ, first lays down a grooved cord, as the
carpenter lays down the keel of his vessel; and on this narrow base the
perfect brain, as month after month passes by, is gradually built up,
like the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain closely
resembling that of a fish; a few additions more convert it into a brain
undistinguishable from that of a reptile; a few additions more impart
to it the perfect appearance of the brain of a bird; it then developes
into a brain exceedingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped; and,
finally, expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply corrugated lobes,
till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique character
as a human brain. Radically such from the first, it passes towards its
full development, through all the inferior forms, from that of the fish
upwards,—thus comprising, during its fœtal progress, an epitome of
geologic history, as if each man were in himself, not the _microcosm_ of
the old fanciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful,—a
compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every creature that
lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum total of all animals,—“the
animal equivalent,” says Oken, “to the whole animal kingdom.” We are
perhaps too much in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they
have been first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the
purposes of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in his
hands. We forget, like the brother “weak in the faith,” instanced by
the Apostle, that they are in themselves “creatures of God;” and too
readily reject the lesson which they teach, simply because they have been
offered in sacrifice to an idol. And this strange fact of the progress
of the human brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at
from the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no
principle recognizable in right reason can it be urged in support of the
development hypothesis;—it is a fact of _fœtal_ development, and of that
only. But it would be well should it lead our metaphysicians to inquire
whether they have not been rendering their science too insulated and
exclusive; and whether the mind that works by a brain thus “fearfully and
wonderfully made,” ought not to be viewed rather in connection with all