Life: Its True Genesis by R. W. Wright

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But first, let us do so from the materialist's own stand-point. Time, they
all agree, is practically infinite--past time, as well as future; while
matter is susceptible of an infinite number of diverse movements, changes,
modifications, combinations, etc.,[9] chemically as well as molecularly
considered. This, they claim, is not a mere hypothetical judgment, but a
mathematically demonstrable proposition. Grant it for the sake of the
argument, and then see if the mastodon does not promptly emerge from some
one of their "experimental flasks," as they choose to put it.

For if the number of these diverse movements, changes, modifications,
etc., of matter, have been infinite, in its progress from the lowest
statical to the highest dynamical manifestation, then every possible, as
well as conceivable, form of matter, must have existed somewhere, and at
some time, in nature, even to its highest and most potentially endowed
plasmic form in which there is life. And if this be true, and the
materialists will not deny but rather affirm it, then the inter-uterine
conditions of matter, in the case of all animals (the mastodon included),
as well as the inter-cellular conditions in the case of all plant-life,
must have existed, with their necessary environments, somewhere and at
some time, in the all-hutched laboratory of nature. Hence, in the infinite
number of these changes and combinations--in the countless collocations of
molecules and chemically changed conditions of matter, we have the
possibilities of all terrestrial life-manifestations, as we have, in the
infinite number of cosmical changes, the possibilities of all planetary,
cometary, and asteroidal manifestations. For whenever these vital changes
occur, the life-manifestations dependent thereon, must as inevitably
follow as that infinitely diffused matter should be aggregated by gravity,
or by what Humboldt calls, in his "Cosmos," the "world-arranging
Intelligence" of the universe.

Who shall say, then, that in that immensely remote and long-protracted
era--the Eocene period--in which the gigantic elephantoids first made
their appearance, there did not exist somewhere, in some one of nature's
more cunning and prolific recesses, the exact plasmic conditions necessary
for the appearance of the mastodon? If they existed anywhere (which is
concessively possible), with the necessary environment (also concessively
possible), then the mastodon could no more help wallowing out of his
essential plasma than the earth can help responding to its axial motion.
All things are framed in the prodigality of nature, and she never commits
an abortion upon herself. If both the conditions and necessary environment
were at any time present, as they must have been on the materialistic
theory, the mastodon is just as easily accounted for as the first fungus,
or the first fungus-spore. [10]

All physicists, as well as physiologists, agree that individual species of
both plants and animals have _disappeared_ from the earth for the want of
the "necessary conditions" under which they once lived and flourished.
What greater fallacy is there, then, in the assumption that they
originally _appeared_ from the presence of these identical conditions,
whatever they may have been, and whenever they may have occurred? We put
this question not simply because the Bible Genesis asserts that "_out of
the ground_ made the Lord God to grow" every plant of the field "before it
was in the earth," as well as every herb of the field "before it grew;"
nor because it declares that their primordial germs are in the earth; nor
because it speaks of the earth as containing within itself the "animating
principle of life." But we put it on the irrefragable logic of the
materialist's own premises and conclusions. They may use other and
different physiological terms from what we should care to employ, but
their "correlates of motion," their "molecular force," their "highly
differentiated life-stuff," etc., may possibly mean nothing more than what
we mean by "vital units," "vital forces," "vital conditions," etc. Their
preference for the terms they employ, over essential "qualities" or
"properties" of matter, is entirely due to the obvious invalidity of their
conclusions, except as their physical theory of life may help them out of
an unpleasant dilemma. "Force" is a more convenient term on which to
allege the _de novo_ origin of life--its spontaneous manifestation in
their experimental flasks--than any vital principle primarily inhering in
matter, and manifesting itself whenever conditions favor. It is to
validate their own reasoning that they construct their fallacious
force-premises, from which to draw their materialistic inductions. In
other words, theirs is the fallacy of _non causa pro causa,_ or that
vicious process of reasoning which alleges some other than the real cause
of vital manifestation, and fastens induction where none is legitimately
inferable.

Burdach, Buffon, Pouchet, Needham, and other professed vitalists, agree
that in all life-manifestations there must be some preA"xisting vital force
or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can
come into existence.[11] M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that
organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to
physical or chemical forces." The AbbA(C) Needham is satisfied to formulate a
"force vA(C)getative," so far as plant-life is concerned; Buffon invariably
falls back on vital force or energy; and Burdach on a "force plastique,"
which is essentially inseparable from nature in her vital manifestations.
According to the latter, the whole universe is an "_organisme absolu_"
constantly endowed with life, and giving expression to it in all
conceivable directions. And all that these vitalists need, to give a full
interpretation to their facts of observation, is to supplement their
theories with the Bible declaration that the animating principle of life
is in the earth, from which all living things make their appearance, each
distinctively after its own kind, whenever environing conditions favor.
For they severally recognize these "necessary conditions" as inseparable
from all vital manifestation.

An effort has been made to show that Goethe was the great inspired prophet
of the doctrine of "Evolution," as a ceaselessly progressive
transformation of one thing into another, in the metamorphoses of plants
and animals; and Haeckel quotes this passage from him as entirely
conclusive of this point: "Thus much we should have gained (towards
solving the problem of life) that all the more perfect organic beings,
among which we include fishes, amphibians, birds, mammals (and at the head
of the latter, man), to be formed according to an archetype, [12] which
merely fluctuates more or less in its ever persistent parts, and moreover,
day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of reproduction." But
this attempt to give a poetic glorification to Haeckelism in Goethe's
speculations, and bring his commanding name into support of the evolution
theory of development, will prove utterly futile in the light of his
"archetype," and the persistency with which he concedes that nature
adheres to perfected forms.

Goethe accepts the doctrine of _vis centripeta_, beyond the influence of
which no developmental progress can be made in the way of diversifying or
variegating ideal types. In other words, he virtually fixes limits to
variability, from the outermost circumference of which reversion must
inevitably take place. His whole doctrine may be summed up generally, if
not specially, in these words: "The animal is fashioned _by_ circumstances
_to_ circumstances," as the eagle to the air and mountain top, the mole to
the loose soil in which it burrows, the seal to the water in which he
frolics, and the bat to the cave, the twilight, and the night air. We
should rather say that the animal is fashioned, after the Great
Architect's pattern, _to_ circumstances, and is only varied _by_
circumstances, and that within the narrowest limits of variability. For
the most that Goethe means by his "archetype" is an ideal pattern, after
which, or on which, a natural group of plants or animals has been
fashioned within the limits of possible variability. But by whose mind, or
rather within whose mind, was this ideal pattern--this essential
archetype--fashioned? Whence this ideal type, this natural group, this
_Archeus_ pervading all nature and fashioning all organic matter? Not from
the mind of Goethe certainly, nor from that of Aristotle or Lucretius, but
from the one supreme mind of the universe, in which the groups of all
living things were originally fashioned in the archetypal world--that
world "which," according to Bolingbroke, "contains intelligibly all that
is contained sensibly in our world."

This archetypal doctrine of Goethe, coupled, as he couples it, with the
influences of environment, or necessary external conditions, with typical
modifications only, while it entirely harmonizes with the Bible genesis of
types (everything modeled after its kind), is far from aiding, or in any
way abetting, the materialistic hypothesis of Haeckel, unless we make
nature at once the creator and modifier of her own archetype. And even
then the variability of species remains unaccounted for, except as we
attribute to nature a _purpose_ to modify persistent forms under a law
that is immutable even in its variability. For the assumption of an
archetype carries with it an archetypal plan and purpose, with a degree of
intelligence, either in or above nature, capable at once of conceiving the
type and determining the limits of its variability. The question is not,
therefore, as many may seem to think, whether species originate by miracle
or by law, but whether laws and causes can exist independently of any
predetermining will or agency in the universe.

Our language, and that of all civilized peoples on the globe, must be
thoroughly recast, not only in its philological and etymological
character, but in its ideologic, etiologic, and other significations,
before we can successfully fall back on an antecedent cause without an
effect, or an effect without an antecedent cause. Besides, the human mind
would have to undergo as complete a subversion of structure as language
itself, before any such attempt at recasting it, on the basis of modern
materialistic ideas, could possibly prove successful. And then, at least
one-third of our language would have to disappear in this iconoclastic
reform. For instance, take any well-tabulated synopsis of our categories
and their relations, and they would nearly all have to be recast or
entirely abandoned. Time, space, matter, motion, intellect, abstract
ideas, volitions, affections, etc., with their several correlates or
co-relations, would all have to undergo a thorough recasting process. The
personal, intersocial, sympathetic, moral, and religious relations and
obligations, would have to be summarily set aside for future revision, if
not for sweeping rejection. All our ideas of life, materiality,
spirituality, animality, vegetability, sensibility, etc., would have to
fall into greater or less desuetude, the language disappearing with the
ideas. All the words expressing our ideas of a superhuman agency, of God,
angels, heaven, revelation, religious doctrines, sentiments, acts of
worship, piety, human accountability to divine institutions, rites,
ceremonies, etc.,--to say nothing of maleficent spirits, mythological and
other fabulous divinities, entering so largely into the spirit and
machinery of all our best poetry--would utterly disappear from our
language. All our churches, minsters, chapels, tabernacles, cathedrals,
and temples erected to the "living God," embracing the finest and most
majestic architecture of the world, would have to succumb to the
iconoclastic zeal of these materialistic reformers. The ten categories of
Aristotle would disappear in the one category of Haeckel, or possibly the
two categories of Bastian--Matter and Motion! Philologically speaking, we
should all be at sea, drifting, like a set of deaf-mutes, on a wide and
inaudible ocean--all inarticulate, tongue-tied, voiceless--with only the
screeching of the sea-mew, or some other sepulchral bird of the night, to
greet us as in wide-mouthed derision of our speechlessness and folly.

But let us see how the incontestible facts of nature, and the truths of
science, fit into the three simple Hebrew words referring to "germs," or
the germinal principle of life, instead of the natural "seeds" of plants
or trees. We have given what we claim to be the true rendering of these
words. To show how perfectly they harmonize with all the phenomenal
manifestations of life in nature, we hurriedly pass to our third chapter.

Chapter III.

Alternations of Forest Growths.

No fact has more profoundly puzzled the vegetable physiologist than the
alternations of forest growths which are everywhere occurring without the
apparent interposition of natural seeds, and which have been considered as
wholly inexplicable except as one unsatisfactory theory after another has
been suggested to account for the wide dissemination and distribution of
their seeds. We have had any number of these theories, more or less
ingeniously constructed, but it is safe to say that none of them
satisfactorily accounts for more than a very limited number of the
phenomena presented. It is only within a comparatively recent period that
these alternations of timber growth have attracted the attention of
scientific men; consequently little more than crude suggestions and
ill-digested facts are at the command of the general reader and writer.
And yet the facts themselves, such as they are, would fill a dozen volumes
of the size of Dr. Hough's recent "Report upon American Forestry." We can
only give a few of the more important facts we have gathered, and many of
these are so deficient in necessary detail that their value is greatly
lessened for scientific uses. This is especially true of nearly all those
noticed and collated by Dr. Hough, in his report to the United States
Commissioner of Agriculture, made in 1877, in which the alternations in
question are referred to at length, but no new suggestions presented, nor
any very important new facts given.

If our construction of the Bible genesis be the correct one, it will, we
think, be unhesitatingly admitted that all the facts collected and
collated by Dr. Hough, together with others more carefully noticed by our
ablest writers on vegetable physiology, not only harmonize with this
ancient Hebrew text, but so completely fit into it, both in its
implications and explications, that adverse criticism will be awed into
silence rather than provoked into any new controversy on the subject. This
remarkable genesis declares that the germs of all living things are in
themselves upon the earth--"upon the face of all the earth." It is true
that this declaration, as contained in the 11th verse of the first chapter
of Genesis, is textually limited to the vegetation of the earth; but the
further emphatic statement that "the animating principle of life" is in
the earth, coupled with the more substantive fact that God commanded the
waters and the earth to bring forth abundantly of every living creature,
with the single exception of man, conclusively extends the language of the
11th verse to whatever vegetable and animal life the earth was
specifically directed to "bring forth." It is our purpose to consider, in
this connection, not only the various facts noticed and theories suggested
by our ablest writers and thinkers on the subject of seed-distribution,
but to ascertain, as far as possible, to what extent their several facts
and theories harmonize with natural phenomena, and at the same time
determine what disposition should be made of them in the light of this new
genesis, herein for the first time disclosed.

Professor George P. Marsh, in his work on "Man and Nature," in which he
treats largely of forestry in Europe, says that "when a forest old enough
to have witnessed the mysteries of the Druids is felled, trees of other
species spring up in its place; and when they, in their turn, fall before
the axe, sometimes even as soon as they have spread their protecting shade
over the surface, the germs which their predecessors had shed, perhaps
centuries before, sprout up, and in due time, if not choked by other trees
belonging to a later stage in the order of natural succession, restore
again the original wood. In these cases, the seeds of the new crop may
have been brought by the wind, by birds, by quadrupeds, or by other
causes; but, in many instances, _this explanation is not probable_." It is
manifest that Professor Marsh uses the word "germs," in this connection,
in the sense of seeds only; for no seed-bearing trees "shed" any other
germs than the natural seeds they bear. And while he admits that, in many
instances, the generally accepted theory concerning the dissemination of
seeds is not a probable one, he still clings to the exploded notion that
vegetable physiology furnishes a record of "numerous instances where seeds
have grown after lying dormant for ages in the earth." He further says, in
the same connection, that "their vitality seems almost imperishable while
they remain in the situations in which nature deposits them;" although he
is reluctant to accept the accounts of "the growth of seeds which had lain
for ages in the ashy dryness of the Egyptian catacombs," believing that
they should be received with great caution, if not rejected altogether.
But why he should scruple about receiving these speculative accounts of
ancient Egyptian cereals, which are sometimes hawked about the country for
two and three dollars a seed, and, in the same breath, accept the absurder
theory that seeds may lie dormant for ages in soils where the hardest and
most enduring woods will utterly perish and disappear in a few brief
years, is wholly inexplicable to us, except as an hypothesis to force a
conclusion, or to account for the otherwise unaccountable alternations of
forest growths.

But the idea that nature has any cunning devices by which she may hide
seeds away where they will remain "almost imperishable" for ages, is not
entirely new with Professor Marsh, nor is it any suggestion that would
be protected by copyright. In finding the winds, birds, quadrupeds, and
other assumed agencies of distribution improbable, he seeks, with Dr.
Dwight, for "the seeds of an ancient vegetation," and, finding none by
actual observation, concludes that nature has some occult, and
thoroughly surreptitious, method of hiding them away, even in soils
below the last glacial drift, where no microscope can possibly reach
them. As the accounts of seeds taken from the mummy-cases of Egypt may
answer the purposes of those seeking to palm off some new cereal as a
nine-days wonder on the ignorant, so these speculations about the
indestructibility of seeds, when hidden away by nature, may answer a
like purpose in imposing upon the over-credulous; but they will hardly
be accepted by the intelligent, much less the scientific, in the light
of all the facts herein given. The simple truth is that all seeds are
speedily perishable by out-door exposure. We hardly know a single seed
that will survive beyond the second year when subjected to such
exposure. If they do not germinate the first year, their vitality is
utterly gone the second year, as hopelessly so as if they had been cast
into the fire and consumed to ashes.

But there is a large class of vegetable phenomena which wholly excludes
the idea of this wonderful vitality of seeds. It is well known that soil
brought up from deep wells and other excavations, often produces plants
entirely unlike the prevailing local flora. This soil has been brought up,
in many instances, from beneath the last glacial drift, where it must have
remained for not less than a quarter of a million years at the lowest
calculation, and may have remained for millions of years, if not longer;
and yet the same singular phenomenon is presented. Exposed to the sun's
rays, and the fructifying influences of showers and dews, the soil
burgeons forth into an independent flora, and such as are nowhere to be
found in the surrounding locality. The writer, in digging a well in
Waukesha, Wis.,--a place now famous for the curative properties of its
waters--in 1847, struck soil at a depth of about thirty-five feet--that
which was evidently ante-glacial. The place is some twenty miles back from
Milwaukee, and the whole section, far into the interior of the state from
Lake Michigan, is one of drift, covering the primeval soil at various
depths, from a few feet up to a hundred or more; and the imbedded soil
must have remained in its place for untold ages. And yet, it was no sooner
brought to the surface than it produced several small plants that were
wholly unlike the prevailing local flora; although, unfortunately, they
did not sufficiently mature to enable us to determine their genera and
species. Considerable portions of this soil were dried and subjected by
us, and the late Dr. John A. Savage, then president of Carroll College, to
microscopic examination, but without discovering the slightest trace of
any seed, or anything resembling seed, in the several portions carefully
examined. The soil, however, contained, in its imbedded place, several
large Norway spruce logs, in a more or less perfect state of preservation.
But there were no cones, nor chits to cones, to be found in it, although
the most rigid examination was made at the time to discover them. That the
seeds of these delicate little plants should have survived the wreck of
this ancient Norwegian forest, or the drift from one, and burst forth into
newness of life after hundreds of thousands, not to say millions of years,
is decidedly too large a draft upon our credulity to be honored "without
sight." But we will return to the alternations of forest growths.

It is within a comparatively recent period that extensive areas of
hemlock, in Greene and Ulster Counties, N.Y., were cut off to supply the
neighboring tanneries with bark. These clearings were no sooner made than
oak, chestnut, birch, and other trees of deciduous foliage, sprang up and
entirely usurped the place of the hemlock; for the reason, no doubt, that
the soil had become chemically unbalanced for the growth of the latter,
while its condition was entirely favorable for the development of the
"germs" (not the natural seed) of the former. These changes in timber
growths have been widely noticed in all parts of this country, as well as
in Europe, but the universal supposition has been that they came from the
natural seeds of their respective localities, those either scattered by
the winds, or borne thither by the birds, by quadrupeds, or by some other
natural agency. No one has suggested the theory of "primordial germs" or
"vital units," or come any nearer to it than Dr. Dwight did in suggesting
"the seeds of an ancient vegetation." The great truth of the Bible genesis
has been wholly overlooked by reason of a faulty translation in the first
instance, as taken from the Masoretic renderings of the sixth century, and
implicitly followed since.

In 1845, a violent tornado swept a wide strip of forest in Northern New
York, from the more thickly settled portions of Jefferson County to Lake
Champlain. The timber that succumbed to the force of the tornado, and
growing at various points along its track, was mainly beech, maple, birch,
ash, hemlock, spruce, etc.; but it was rarely replaced, at any point, by
the same timber, in the growths that almost immediately followed. The
trees that are now growing along the track of the tornado are principally
poplar, cherry, birch, and a little beech and ironwood: no ash, maple,
spruce, or hemlock, except here and there, at considerable intervals, a
tree or two which may have been replaced by natural seed. The important
fact noticeable, in this connection, is that the aggressive timber--that
replacing the old--entirely usurped the place of the evergreen growths,
supplanting them with those that were wholly deciduous. Besides, it does
not appear that the poplar, the cherry, and the ironwood, which were
altogether aggressive, previously grew near enough to the track of the
tornado to have possibly supplied the seed necessary for their appearance
and growth.

The fact was specially noticeable at the time, and has been widely
communicated since, that the white oak timber cut off at Valley Forge for
fuel and other army purposes in the American camp, in the winter of
1777-78, was succeeded by black oak, hickory, chestnut, etc.--the white
oak entirely disappearing, although by far the most favorably situated for
propagation by seed. But the alternations of forest growths had attracted
too little attention at that time to render the meagre facts given of any
special value to scientific men. If the usurping timber had grown in the
immediate neighborhood (a fact not stated), it might have come from
natural seeds, and not from primordial germs under "favoring conditions."

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