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Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com
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CHAP. |
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I. |
FOR THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY AND TERRESTRIAL PHYSICS. |
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II. |
FOR THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE. |
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III. |
FOR THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN AND EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. |
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IV. |
FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND THEORY OF CIVILIZATION. |
But as when one lights a candle to look for one or two things which they want, the light will not confine itself to those two objects, so methinks, in seeking after these two, the Universal Deluge and Paradise, and in retrieving the notion and doctrine of the Primeval Earth upon which they depended, we have cast a light upon all Antiquity.—Thomas Burnet.
I have laid it down as an invariable maxim constantly to follow historical tradition, and to hold fast by that clue even when many things appear strange and almost inexplicable, or at least enigmatical; for in the investigation of ancient history, the moment we let slip that thread of Ariadne, we can find no outlet from the labyrinth of fanciful theories and the chaos of clashing opinions.—F. von Schlegel, Philosophy of History.
Le mythe du jardin d’Éden n’est point une fiction; il nous donne, sous une forme d’enfantine poésie, la première page de l’histoire morale de humanité, de cette histoire qui a pour documents non plus simplement quelques silex plus ou moins taillés, mais toute cette survivance d’une vie divine dans l’âme humaine, manifestée par ses aspirations et ses douleurs, et par cet universal sentiment de la déchéance, qui palpite dans toutes les mythologies et est l’inspiration dominente de toutes les religions.—E. de Pressensé.
Der Tempel des Heidenthums ist ein uralter Bau, aber ein Bau der nicht aus dem Heidenthum stammt und nicht von den Heiden selbst errichtet ist. Die Mythen-Inschriften und heiligen Legenden dieses Tempels enthalten ursprünglich die Urgeschichte der Welt und des Menschengeschlechtes, und die Verheissungen welche demselben im Anfange geworden sind.—Lüken.
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How seemed this globe of ours when thou didst scan it? |
The solution of the problem of Life may come from an unexpected quarter.—John Fiske.
If the alleged facts and the conclusions of the foregoing chapters shall be accepted as correct, it is plain that in finding the true answer to one of the longest standing and most baffling of the problems of Biblical theology we have at the same time found one of those central key-truths, acquaintance with which affects a great many other kinds of knowledge. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the acceptance of this alleged truth upon its appropriate evidences, must affect men's estimate of the sources of knowledge. For if the sacred traditions of mankind, when once rightly interpreted, are discovered to be in astonishing harmony with each other, and to yield results which our most advanced sciences, working in the most varied fields of research, singularly conspire to verify, this discovery cannot fail to give new significance to history in all
its departments and in all its teachings. But apart from this general effect of a verification of ancient testimony, our precise conclusion as to the location of the cradle of the human race has a most evident and important connection with all physical, paleontological, archæological, philological, mythological, ethnological, and "culture-historical" speculation,—in a word, a most evident and important connection with about every problem which in a marked degree attracts and occupies our modern thought. 1 In the present Part it is proposed to notice the relation of our facts and conclusions to a few of these fields of study, and first of all, in the present chapter, their bearing upon the study of biology and terrestrial physics.
In Part Third and in the seventh chapter of Part Fifth and elsewhere, we have already had various illustrations of the fascinating and authenticating light which the biological sciences can throw upon the study of prehistoric traditions. Possibly the reader, if devoted to this kind of study, has wondered why a field of illustration so rich has not oftener been utilized by writers upon antiquity. But however important this bearing of biological upon prehistoric studies may be, it should not be forgotten that the counterpart bearing of the study
of the earliest traceable thoughts and beliefs of mankind upon biology and upon the most fruitful study of biology is not a whit less important. This is a point of utmost moment to the fields of knowledge concerned and also to the general theory of personal and organized culture; yet it is a point most infrequently brought under the consideration of thoughtful readers.
It is an unfortunate and ominous fact that the average biologist of the present day sees nothing worthy of his professional attention back of the present century. The intellectual history of the human race has not the slightest interest for him or value for his work. Ages on ages of human observation and thought and speculation touching the problems of life are to him as if they had never been. If he acquaints himself with them in the slightest degree, it is usually only for the sake of amusing his hearers with what he considers the grotesque and absurd ideas of former times, and impressing them with the contrast which latter-day "science" presents. For all that his race has done until just before his own immediate teachers began, he has little more than pity and contempt.
Now, in any department of human learning, such an attitude of mind is certainly to be deplored. Its effects are detrimental in every aspect. In proportion as it prevails among any class of intellectual workers, in just that proportion does that class become isolated from the one collective and historic intellectual life of humanity. In this way the collective intellectual life suffers, and yet more do the isolated workers suffer. Humanity, conscious of an intellectual history, naturally comes to pay little
attention to these men who deny it, or take no interest in it. On the other hand, any class of men who ignore the history of the human mind and begin all true history and all true science with their own achievements, by this very procedure place themselves outside that spiritual fellowship in which all forms and fragments of knowledge find unity and mutual supplementing. The circle of their intellectual sympathies and tastes is narrowed. With the loss of broad sympathies and tastes they are in danger of losing even the capacity to discern and appreciate any kind of truth outside the limited range of their own specialized field of professional research. So far has this perilous tendency already gone that it is a difficult thing in any country to find a celebrated biologist whose publicly advocated theory of education for his own field of labor does not quietly ignore, or actively antagonize, the broadening historical and humanistic studies which alone can qualify a man for intelligent sympathy with all good learning. Unless the tendency can in some way be checked, there is positive danger lest the special cultivators of biology and the natural sciences become as narrow and isolated and influenceless a guild of experts as are the antiquarian-catalogue makers of modern Europe. 1
In studies like the one which has thus far engaged us lies the best possible corrective for this one-sidedness. In this field are found stimulation for the student's curiosity, facts for his understanding, arguments for his reason, play for his imagination. And all the time his study of Nature and his study of Man are mutually helpful to each other. He now has Nature and her life before him in two forms: first, as she has entombed herself in the great cemetery of the rocks; and secondly, as she has pictured herself in historic and even prehistoric human thought. If the former gives her with greater tangibility, it is only the tangibility of the mouldering skeleton. It is the latter which shows her alive and filled with all life's meanings. Each is important in its place, both being reciprocally corrective and mutually complementary.
As yet the biologist has not profited by ancient conceptions of Nature as he should have done. How long and slow has been the progress of the botanist up to this latest conception that all the life-forms of the vegetable kingdom proceeded originally from one centre, and that at the Pole! The ancient Iranian myth of "the tree of all seeds," from which proceeded "the germs of all species of plants" that ever grew, and which, moreover, was located at the
[paragraph continues] North Pole, ought long ago to have suggested to him the truth as to the genetic unity of the vegetable kingdom and also as to its pristine centre of distribution. The same may be said of the zoölogist and the suggestiveness of the myths of the same people respecting "the primeval ox" and the Gosh, "the personification of the animal kingdom." 1 In these survivals of ancient culture we have the forms in which prehistoric zoölogy expressed the unity, the monogenesis, and the north polar origin of the entire fauna of the earth.
It is now, perhaps, too late for the biologist to gain from these particular myths the instruction which generations ago they could have given him. By slower and more painful methods this beautiful polocentric conception of the vegetable, animal, and human worlds has at last been reached. The problems of earliest floral and faunal and ethnic distribution have shut men up to its acceptance. But if the discovery of the accordant significance of these ancient myths has been equally delayed, we may at least indulge the hope that the unexpected agreement of the prehistoric conception with that of latest science will inspire in candid students of Nature a new and higher respect for the primeval teachings and beliefs of mankind. Meantime let it not be forgotten that there are other myths, of equal antiquity and possibly of wider prevalence, the significance of which for the progress of biology may to-day be as great as ever was that of the tree of all seeds.
Notice, for example, this curious fact: that while in ancient East Aryan thought the gods on Mount
[paragraph continues] Meru are of prodigious stature the proper tenants of the adjacent regions are somewhat less, though still gigantic; and they seem to dwindle regularly in size from Varsha to Varsha, until we reach Bhârata, the Varsha which borders upon the equatorial ocean and is peopled with ordinary men. And as if the inhabitants of Hades, being still farther to the South, must be by some law of nature still smaller than men, Prince Satyavân's soul, when led away to Yama's abode, is described in the Mahâbhârata as only "a thumb in height." A striking gradation, every one will say. Beginning with beings sometimes represented as miles in height, it ends on the borders of the Land of Death with disembodied spirits whose stature is only a thumb's length. But this conception of the range of the kingdom of generated and mutable life was not limited to the ancestors of the Hindus. In the most ancient Greek thought the proper habitat of the Pygmies was near the equatorial Ocean-river; farther northward was the abode of men; still farther proceeding, one came into the region of giants; while in polar Olympos the gods were so colossal that in his fall prostrate Arês "covered seven acres." 1 Traces of the same remarkable adjustment are found in other mythologies. 2 Possibly this far-off prehistoric conception has some significance, some lesson for the biology of to-day.
What should this lesson be if not that in all our
researches into the origin and sustaining conditions of life the phenomena of the highest North should be taken into account? Too long have those who busy themselves with these investigations been turning their attention to the ice-cold abysses of the "deep sea," hoping in some "bathybius" clot of the sunless ocean-bottom to find the protoplasmic power which has transmuted inorganic matter into microcosms of organic life. In no such region of cold and darkness should this search be made. 1 Let life's beginnings and life's feeding forces be looked for where its supreme vigor and exuberance have been seen,—at the pristine centre whence the types and forms of life have spread victoriously through the world; let them be studied at the Pole. 2
On this subject as conservative an authority as
[paragraph continues] Principal Dawson recently remarked: "It is not impossible that in the plans of the Creator the continuous summer sun of the Arctic regions may have been made the means for the introduction, or at least for the rapid growth and multiplication, of new and more varied types of plants." 1
In this true centre what new and interesting aspects the problems of life immediately take on! 2 Here we have a regnancy of sunlight such as we never dreamed of in our lower zones. Here we have
a tension and a direction of terrestrial magnetism with whose biological significance we are utterly unacquainted. Here we have electric forces which pour their currents through every grass-blade, and tip the very hills with lambent flame. 1 Shall not such absolutely exceptional biological conditions and energies be found to yield some exceptional biological result? Is not this a more hopeful field for the study of the origin of life than the dark and almost congealed recesses of the deep sea? The old theologians were accustomed to call Adam and Eve
the "Protoplasts;" in their ancient polar home it is possible that science may yet discover the divine secret of all "protoplasm."
Again, our new interest in one of the terrestrial polar regions gives fresh significance to the contrasts between the two. 1 Within ten years our most eminent American geologist has said, "I find no explanation in the present state of science, wherefore most of the dry land of the globe should have been located about the North Pole, and of the water about the South. Physicists say that it indicates greater attraction and therefore a greater density in the solid material beneath the southern ocean. But why the mineral ingredients should have been so gathered about the South Pole as to give the crust there greater density is the unanswered query. It may be that magnetite is much more abundantly diffused through the Antarctic crust than the Arctic. This is only one of many possibilities, and it is at present without a satisfactory fact to stand upon beyond the general truth that iron was universally present." 2
But the diversity of the two Poles is as great and as perplexing to the biologist as to the physical geographer. "The researches made show that the two polar regions differ greatly. The seas of the
[paragraph continues] Arctic teem with animal life. Land animals, such as the bear, wolf, reindeer, musk-ox, and Arctic fox, are scattered over the frozen surface of the land where they find the means of sustenance. The air is peopled with innumerable flocks of birds; a hardy vegetation extends close up to the Arctic Circle, and beyond it, in mosses, lichens, scurvy-grass, sorrel, small stunted shrubs, dwarfed trees, and in summer beautiful flowers. In the Antarctic, on the contrary, vegetation ceases at a certain limit, trees terminating at about 56° S. latitude. Animal life abounds in the seas, but though birds exist in great numbers and in varieties unknown in the Arctic, no quadrupeds are found upon the land." 1
With this we may compare the already cited language of Sir Joseph Hooker: "Geographically speaking, there is no Antarctic flora except a few lichens and seaweeds." 2
Would it not seem as if the South Pole must have been covered by "the barren sea" at the period when floral and faunal life, starting at its Arctic centre, began its conquering marches over all the Earth? Or is there rather some marked difference in the biological value of the poles themselves? 3
But polar biological research involves antecedent Polar Exploration and a wider and more systematic
study of Terrestrial Physics. 1 Herein lies a fresh and novel impulse to reinvest on every side the still uncaptured citadel of the Arctic Pole. Long ago could Maury write, "As science has advanced, men have looked with deeper and deeper longings toward the mystic circles of the Polar regions. There icebergs are framed and glaciers launched; there the tides have their cradle, the whales their nursery; there the winds complete their circuits, and the currents of the sea their round; there the aurora is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest; there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power and of vast influence upon the well-being of man are continually at play. Within the Arctic Circle is the pole of the winds and the poles of cold, the pole of the earth and of the magnet. It is a circle of mysteries; and the desire to enter it, to explore its untrodden wastes and secret chambers, and to study its physical aspects has grown into a longing. Noble daring has made Arctic ice and snow-clad seas classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ambition that leads men there. It is a higher feeling, a holier motive: a desire to look into the works of creation, to comprehend the economy of our planet, and to grow wiser and better by the knowledge." If such a passion for discovery could be kindled in the presence of the older and more abstract problems, what ought to be the result when to these are added the possibility of solving at least some of the mysteries of Nature's Life, and the certainty of standing where Human Life began!
314:1 Even psychological research may be found to have a profound interest in our result: "Here the question arises how far it [the juggler's mind-power over matter] may be affected by, or dependent upon, electrical and magnetic phenomena and surroundings and climatic influences, since it flourishes at its best, both in the Old World and in the New, as one approaches the regions of the Arctic Circle, and enters the lands of the aurora and midnight sun." G. Archie Stockwell, M. D., "Indian Jugglery and Psychology," in The Independent, New York, Sept. 27, 1883, p. 1221.
316:1 A few years ago Mr. John Stuart Mill, in an address before a Scotch university, put forth a defense of the claims of classical studies to a place in the regular university curriculum. For this one crime he was recently editorially assailed and vilified through several columns of an American organ of natural science, and despite the fact that he was notoriously a disbeliever in Revelation, and was a professed admirer of Comte's atheistic evolutional sociology, the dreadful charge is brought forward: "He was in the Golden-Age, Paradise-Lost dispensation of thought, in which the notions of the early perfection of mankind and the superiority of the ancients were p. 317 contrasted with the degeneracy of the moderns; and so completely was his intellect possessed and perverted by this view that he was disabled from appreciating the immense and epoch-making influence of the modern doctrine of evolution." "The Dead-Language Superstition," Popular Science Monthly, New York, 1883, p. 703. Such naturalists are too unlettered to know their own party leaders, or to be aware of the fact that it is precisely to biology that Mill pays the splendid tribute of declaring that among all departments of human knowledge it "affords as yet the only example of the true principles of rational classification."
318:1 Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, Part ii., p. 110.
319:1 Iliad, xxi. 407. In keeping herewith the more than gigantic Poseidon passes with four strides from Thracian Samos to Ægæ. Il., xiii. 20.
319:2 "The idea of the soul as a sort of 'thumbling' is familiar to the Hindus and to German folk-lore."—E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 450 n.
320:1 "As we descend from the shore into deep water, the temperature becomes lower and lower the deeper we go, until we come to a stratum or zone of water about 32°-36° Fahrenheit, where circumpolar or Arctic life alone abounds. . . . The water of the ocean all over the globe below a depth of one thousand fathoms is of an Arctic temperature."—Packard, Zoölogy, p. 665.
320:2 Since the above was written, a distinguished specialist in deep-sea dredging has borne the following striking testimony: "With regard to the constitution of the deep-sea fauna, one of the most remarkable features is the general absence from it of Paleozoic forms, excepting so far as representatives of the Mollusca and Brachiopoda are concerned; and it is remarkable that amongst the deep-sea Mollusca no representatives of the Nautilidæ and Ammonitidæ, so excessively abundant in ancient periods, occur, and that Lingula, the most ancient Brachiopod, should occur in shallow water only." Professor H. N. Moseley, F. R. S., Biological Address before British Association in 1884. Nature, August 28, 1884, p. 428. The same high authority adds, "With regard to the origin of the deep-sea fauna there can be little doubt that it has been derived almost entirely from the littoral fauna,"—agreeing herein with Professor Sven Loven in his "splendid monograph," Pourtalesia, Stockholm, 1883. The funeral sermon of the bathybius theory of the origin of life has already been preached, and the text of the sermon was Job xxviii. 24.
321:1 "The Genesis and Migration of Plants," in The Princeton Review, 1879, p. 292.
321:2 The following, from a recent newspaper, suggests some of the new lines of desirable investigation:—
"The Norwegian plant-geographer, Schubeler, a short time ago called attention to some striking and surprising peculiarities manifested by vegetation in high latitudes, which he ascribed to the intensive light-effects of the long days. Most plants in these regions produce much larger and heavier seeds than in lower latitudes. Grain is heavier in the North than in the more Southern latitudes; the increase of weight being due to the assimilation of non-nitrogenous substances, while the protein products have no part in it. The leaves of most plants grow larger in the higher latitudes, and at the same time take on a deeper, darker color. This fact has been observed not only in most of the wild trees and shrubs, but also in fruit trees and even in kitchen-garden plants. It has further been observed that the flowers of most plants are larger and more deeply colored, and that many flowers which are white in the South become in the far North violet."
So potent and irrepressible are the powers of life in highest Arctic latitudes that neither darkness nor the indescribable cold avail against them. The algic flora well illustrates this statement. According to a writer in Nature, Oct. 30, 1884, nearly all Arctic algæ live several years, and, in order that they may be able to effect the work of propagation and nourishment, their organs are in operation during the dark as well as the light season. Whilst wintering at the northernmost part of Spitzbergen in 1872-73, Professor Kjellman observed, in the middle of the winter—viz., at a time when the sun was lowest, and the darkness, therefore, most intense—that a considerable development and growth of the organs of nourishment took place, while, as regards the organs of propagation, he found that p. 322 it was just at this season that they were most developed. Spores of all kinds were produced and became mature, and they developed into splendid plants. The Arctic algæ, therefore, present the remarkable spectacle of plants which develop their organs of nourishment, and particularly their organs of propagation, all the year round, even during the long Polar night, growing regularly at a temperature of between -1° and -2° C., and even attaining a great size at a temperature which never rises above freezing-point. As to "mother-region," the result at which Professor Kjellman arrived was that the algæ flora of the Arctic Ocean is not an immigrant flora, but that its origin lay in the Polar Sea itself. This theory is, he believes, proved by the fact that the Arctic algæ flora is rich in endemic species. There are many species found both in the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, a large percentage of which reaches very far north in the Arctic Sea, and which have attained a high degree of development there, being characteristic algæ of the Arctic Ocean; and that these species have been originated there, and gradually spread to the other two oceans is, as he believes, more than probable. How little our zonal diversities of climate affect the question of the possibility of a universal distribution of a north polar flora, or even fauna, is well illustrated in the following: "A remarkable fact associated with the ocean temperature is that forms of animal life belonging to the Arctic seas have been dredged up from the Antarctic Ocean at depths of two thousand fathoms, and may have passed from pole to pole through the tropics [in deep-sea currents] without having been subjected to a greater variation of temperature than some five degrees or so." Gen. R. McCormick, Voyages of Discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas. London, 1884: vol. i., p. 354.
322:1 The Arctic Manual, p. 739.
323:1 "The higher mean temperature of the Northern compared to the Southern hemisphere is clearly proved and universally acknowledged." Professor Hennessy on "Terrestrial Climate" in Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. London and Edinburgh, 1859: p. 189. On the Northern hemisphere's greater length of spring and summer see Malte-Brun, System of Universal Geography. Boston, 1834: vol. i., p. 14. Also Mansfield Merriman, The Figure of the Earth. New York, 1881: p. 76. The disparity of mean temperature is now believed to be less than was formerly supposed.
323:2 Professor Dana, in American Journal of Science, 1875, vol. xxi.
324:1 C. P. Daly in Johnson's Cyclopædia, Art. "Polar Research."
324:2 Nature, London, 1881, p. 447.
324:3 The latter explanation would seem to be favored by the experiments of Dr. Ferdinand Cohn, who found that a positive electrode would hinder the development of micrococcus "in bei weitem höherem Grade als die negative." Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen. Breslau, 1879: p. 159. It is also known that eggs may be hatched quicker at one pole of a magnet than at the other.
325:1 See Appendix, Sect. VII.: "Latest Polar Research." Also Andree, Der Kampf um den Nordpol. 4 Aufl., Bielefeld, 1882.