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Time and Change

J >> John Burroughs >> Time and Change



Produced by Charles Aldarondo




TIME AND CHANGE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

1912






PREFACE





I suspect that in this volume my reader will feel that I have given
him a stone when he asked for bread, and his feeling in this respect
will need no apology. I fear there is more of the matter of hard
science and of scientific speculation in this collection than of
spiritual and aesthetic nutriment; but I do hope the volume is not
entirely destitute of the latter. If I have not in some degree
succeeded in transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome literary
bread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them into a soil in which
some green thing or flower of human interest and emotion may take
root and grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end I had in
view.

I am well aware that my own interest in geology far outruns my
knowledge, but if I can in some degree kindle that interest in my
reader, I shall be putting him on the road to a fuller knowledge
than I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have probably
loved the rocks more than I have studied them. In my youth I
delighted in lingering about and beneath the ledges of my native
hills, partly in the spirit of adventure and a boy's love of the
wild, and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and the
evidences of immense time that looked out from their gray and
crumbling fronts. I was in the presence of Geologic Time, and was
impressed by the scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowing
who or what he was. But he put a spell upon me that has deepened as
the years have passed, and now my boyhood ledges are more
interesting to me than ever.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite
sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If
the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the
latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. As
science turns over the leaves of the great rocky volume, it sees the
imprint of animals and plants upon them and it traces their changes
and the appearance of new species from age to age. The biologic tree
has grown and developed as the geologic soil in which it is rooted
has deepened and ripened. I am sure I was an evolutionist in the
abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read
Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept
the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an
easy matter.

The essays on the subject in this volume are the outcome of the
stages of brooding and thinking which I have gone through in
accepting this doctrine. I am aware that there is much repetition in
them, but maybe on that very account they will help my reader to go
along with me over the long road we have to travel to reach this
conclusion.

July, 1912.






CONTENTS





I. THE LONG ROAD

II. THE DIVINE ABYSS

III. THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

IV. THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST

V. HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

VI. THE OLD ICE FLOOD

VII. THE FRIENDLY SOIL

VIII. PRIMAL ENERGIES

IX. SCIENTIFIC FAITH

X. "THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"

XI. THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

XII. THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

XIII. THE GOSPEL OF NATURE






TIME AND CHANGE

I

THE LONG ROAD

I





The long road I have in mind is the long road of evolution,--the
road you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, from
the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex
and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal
kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching through
immeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudes
of which we can form but feeble conceptions.

The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready to admit that
they, or any of their forebears, have ever made such a journey. We
have all long been taught that our race was started upon its career
only a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the warrings of
savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant garden with everything
needed close at hand. This belief has faded a good deal in our time,
especially among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, as the
special creation theory, it held sway in the minds of the older
naturalists like Agassiz and Dawson, long after Darwin had launched
his revolutionary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the
same zoological scheme as the lower orders.

We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations of science, they
have been so long adjusted to a revelation, so-called, of an
entirely different character. It gives them a wrench more or less
violent when we try to make them at home and at their ease amid
these new and startling disclosures. To many good people evolution
seems an ungodly doctrine, like setting up a remorseless logic in
the place of an omnipresent Creator. But there is no help for it.
Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little
anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the
universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic
chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier
for it.

When we accepted Newton's discovery of the force called gravitation,
we virtually surrendered ourselves to the enemy, and started upon a
road, the road of natural causation, that traverses the whole system
of created things. We cannot turn back; we may lie down by the
roadside and dream our old dreams, but our children and their
children will press on, and will be exhilarated by the journey.

It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evolution confronts
us with, and it requires courage calmly to face it. But it is in
perfect keeping with the whole career of physical science, which is
forever directing our attention to common near-at-hand facts for the
key to remote and mysterious occurrences.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life,
because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the
exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation. That
man should have been brought into existence by the fiat of an
omnipotent power is less an occasion for wonder than that he should
have worked his way up from the lower non-human forms. That the
manward impulse should never have been lost in all the appalling
vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have pushed steadily
on, through mollusk and fish and amphibian and reptile, through
swimming and creeping and climbing things, and that the forms that
conveyed it should have escaped the devouring monsters of the earth,
sea, and air till it came to its full estate in a human being, is
the wonder of wonders.

In like manner, evolution raises immensely the value of the
biological processes that are everywhere operative about us, by
showing us that these processes are the channels through which the
creative energy has worked, and is still working. Not in the far-off
or in the exceptional does it seek the key to man's origin, but in
the sleepless activity of the creative force, which has been pushing
onward and upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to full
fruition in man.

It is easy to inject into man's natural history a supernatural
element, as nearly all biologists and anthropologists before
Darwin's time did, and as many serious people still do. It is too
easy, in fact, and the temptation to do so is great. It makes short
work of the problem of man's origin, and saves a deal of trouble.
But this method is more and more discredited, and the younger
biologists and natural philosophers accept the zoological
conception of man, which links him with all the lower forms, and
proceed to work from that.

When we have taken the first step in trying to solve the problem of
man's origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in his
history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his
supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the
pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the
low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java,--Pithecanthropus erectus,
described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost
said "step on his tail," for we undoubtedly, if we go back far
enough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a
certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it also has a
coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But could we stop with the tailed
man--the manlike ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start him
with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his own invention?

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man's origin,
and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can find
the point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by the
supernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miracle
begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seas
must have been natural, or it would not have occurred,--must have
been potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far as
we know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of cause
and effect is continuous and inviolable.

We know that no man is born of full stature, with his hat and boots
on; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infant
grows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleated
protoplasm in the mother's womb. Why may not the race of man grow
from a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it
IS the order of nature,--first the germ, the inception, then the
slow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of our
own thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language.

In our candid moments we acknowledge the animal in ourselves and in
our neighbors,--especially in our neighbors,--the beast, the shark,
the hog, the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the notion of
our animal origin, that gives us pause. To believe that our remote
ancestor, no matter how remote in time or space, was a lowly
organized creature living in the primordial seas with no more brains
than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts our scientific faith
to severe test.

Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon millions of years, we
see the earth swarming with life, low bestial life, devouring and
devoured, myriads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, dependent upon
place and clime, shaped to specific ends like machines,--to fly, to
swim, to climb, to run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to
graze, to crush,--knowing not what they do, as void of conscious
purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, the coils, and the
wings in the vegetable world, making no impression upon the face of
nature, as much a part of it as the trees and the stones, species
after species having its day, and then passing off the stage, when
suddenly, in the day before yesterday in the geologic year, so
suddenly as to give some color of truth to the special creation
theory, a new and strange animal appears, with new and strange
powers, separated from the others by what appears an impassable
gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers than the others, but
vastly more specialized in his brain and mental powers, instituting
a new order of things upon the earth, the face of which he in time
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weapons
and language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, and
putting all things under his feet,--man the wonder-worker, the
beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself,
the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, the
hero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing with
prodigious strides when once fairly launched upon his career. Can it
be possible, we ask, that this god was fathered by the low bestial
orders below him,--instinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity
developing into human benevolence, the slums of nature sending forth
the ruler of the earth. It is a hard proposition, I say, undoubtedly
the hardest that science has ever confronted us with.

Haeckel, discussing this subject, suggests that it is the parvenu in
us that is reluctant to own our lowly progenitors, the pride of
family and position, like that of would-be aristocratic sons who
conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than
that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there is
nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of the
biologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm
that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His
radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a
world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he
does, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks us
because of the inconceivable stretch of time during which it has
been at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time as
sidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us by
experience are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure the
ocean.

Several million years, or one million years,--how can we take it in?
We cannot. A hundred years is a long time in human history, and how
we pause before a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of fifty
thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten hundred thousand, or one
million, or of one hundred million! What might not the slow but
ceaseless creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair in
each generation! If our millionaires had to earn their wealth cent
by cent, and carry each cent home with them at night, it would be
some years before they became millionaires. This is but a faint
symbol of the slow process by which nature has piled up her riches.
She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To clothe the earth with
soil made from the disintegrated mountains--can we figure that time
to ourselves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying
that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a
gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity
will only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a
process almost as slow. In our case the gauze veil is the air, and
the rains, and the snows, before which even granite crumbles. See
what the god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the
river valleys and gorges--cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon,
and yet this canyon is but of yesterday in geologic time. Only give
the evolutionary god time enough and all these miracles are surely
wrought.

Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time has played in
the earth's history,--just time, duration,--so slowly, oh, so
slowly, have the great changes been brought about! The turning of
mud and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems to have
been merely a question of time. Mud does not become rock in man's
time, nor vegetable matter become coal. These processes are too slow
for us. The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles deep,
under an even pressure, is only a question of time. Allow time
enough and force enough, and a layer of granite may be bent like a
bow. The crystals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the
strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, much more
rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure. Probably no human agency
could flex a stratum of rock, because there is not time enough, even
if there were power enough. "A low temperature acting gradually,"
says my geology, "during an indefinite age would produce results
that could not be otherwise brought about even through greater
heat." "Give us time," say the great mechanical forces, "and we will
show you the immobile rocks and your rigid mountain chains as
flexible as a piece of leather." "Give us time," say the dews and
the rains and the snowflakes, "and we will make you a garden out of
those same stubborn rocks and frowning ledges." "Give us time," says
Life, starting with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, "and I
will not stop till I have peopled the earth with myriad forms and
crowned them all with man."

Dana thinks that had "a man been living during the changes that
produced the coal, he would not have suspected their progress," so
slow and quiet were they. It is probable that parts of our own
sea-coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as the
oscillation of the land and sea went on that resulted in the laying
down of the coal measures.

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic process. In the face
of geologic time, man's appearance upon the earth as man, with a
written history, is something that has just happened; it was in this
morning's paper, we read of it at breakfast. As evolution goes, it
will not be old news yet for a hundred thousand years or so, and by
that time, what will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate
of accelerated speed? Probably he will not have caught the gods of
evolution at their work, or witnessed the origin of species by
natural descent, these things are too slow for him; but he will
certainly have found out many things that we are all eager to know.

In nature as a whole we see results and not processes. We see the
rock strata bent and folded, we see the whole mountain-chains flexed
and shortened by the flexure; but had we been present, we should not
have suspected what was going on. Our little span of life does not
give us the parallax necessary. The rock strata, miles thick, may be
being flexed now under our feet, and we know it not. The earth is
shrinking, but so slowly! When, under the slow strain, the strata
suddenly give way or sink, and an earthquake results, then we know
something has happened.

A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubtless thinks
wisely, that the reason why we have never been able to produce
living from non-living matter in our laboratories, is that we cannot
take time enough. Even if we could bring about the conditions of the
early geologic ages in which life had its dawn, which of course we
cannot, we could not produce life because we have not geologic time
at our disposal.

The reaction which we call life was probably as much a cosmic or
geologic event as were the reactions which produced the different
elements and compounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in the
womb of time. During what cycles upon cycles the great mother-forces
of the universe must have brooded over the inorganic before the
organic was brought forth! The archean age, during which the
brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as long as all the ages
since.

How we are baffled when we talk about the beginning of anything in
nature or in our own lives! In our experience there must be a first,
but when did manhood begin; when did puberty, when did old age,
begin? When did each stage of our mental growth begin? When or where
did the English language begin, or the French, or the German? Was
there a first English word spoken? From the first animal sound, if
we can conceive of such, up to the human speech of to-day, there is
an infinite gradation of sounds and words.

Was there a first summer, a first winter, a first spring? There
could hardly have been a first day even for ages and ages, but only
slowly approximating day. After an immense lapse of time the air
must have cleared and the day become separated from the night, and
the seasons must have become gradually defined. Things slowly emerge
one after another from a dim, nebulous condition, both in our own
growth and experience and in the development of the physical
universe.

In nature there is no first and last. There is an endless beginning
and an endless ending. There was no first man or first woman, no
first bird, or fish, or reptile. Back of each one stretches an
endless chain of approximating men and birds and reptiles.

This talk about the time and place where man began his existence
seems to me misleading, because it appears to convey the idea that
he began as man at some time, in some place. Whereas he grew. He
began where and when the first cell appeared, and he has been on the
road ever since. There is no point in the line where he emerged from
the not-man and became man. He was emerging from the not-man for
millions of years, and when you put your finger on an animal form
and say, This is man, you must go back through whole geologic
periods before you reach the not-man. If Darwin is right, there is
no more reason for believing that the different species or forms of
animal life were suddenly introduced than there is for believing
that the soil, or the minerals, gold, silver, diamonds, or vegetable
mold and verdure were suddenly introduced.




II



If we know anything of the earth's past history, we know that the
continents were long in forming, that they passed through many
vicissitudes of heat and cold, of fire and flood, of upheaval and
subsidence--that they had, so to speak, their first low, simple
rudimentary or invertebrate life, that they were all slow in getting
their backbones, slower still in clothing their rock ribs with soil
and verdure, that they passed through a sort of amphibian stage, now
under water, now on dry land, that their many kinds of soils and
climes were not differentiated and their complex water-systems
established till well into Tertiary times--in short, that they have
passed more and more from the simple to the complex, from the
disorganized to the organized. When man comes to draw his sustenance
from their breasts, may they not be said to have reached the
mammalian stage?

The fertile plain and valley and the rounded hill are of slow
growth, immensely slow. But any given stage of the earth has
followed naturally from the previous stage, only more and more and
higher and higher forces took a hand in the game. First its elements
passed through the stage of fire, then through the stage of water,
then merged into the stage of air. More and more the aerial
elements--oxygen, carbon, nitrogen--have entered into its
constituents and fattened the soil. The humanizing of the earth has
been largely a process of oxidation. More than disintegrated rock
makes up the soil; the air and the rains and the snows have all
contributed a share.

The history of the soil which we turn with our spade, and stamp with
our shoes, covers millions upon millions of years. It is the ashes
of the mountains, the leavings of untold generations of animal and
vegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted from the heavens;
it flowed out from the fiery heart of the globe; it has been worked
over and over by frost and flood, blown by winds, shoveled by ice,
--mixed and kneaded and moulded as the house-wife kneads and moulds
her bread,--refining and refining from age to age. Much of it was
held in solution in the primordial seas, whence it was filtered and
used and precipitated by countless forms of marine life, making a
sediment that in time became rocks, that again in time became
continents or parts of them, which the aerial forces reduced to
soil. Indeed, the soil itself is an evolution, as much so as the
life upon it.

We probably have little conception of how intimate and cooperative
all parts of the universe are with one another,--of the debt we owe
to the farthest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We must
owe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and Caenozoic time; they
helped to fertilize the soil for us, and to discipline the ruder
forces of life. We owe a debt to all that has gone before: to the
heavens above and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets that
ground down the mountains, and to the ocean currents. Just as we owe
a debt to the men and women in our line of descent, so we owe a debt
to the ruder primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use,
and took a hand in the game of animal life.

The gods of evolution had served a long apprenticeship; they had
gained proficiency and were master workmen. Or shall we say that the
elements of life had become more plastic and adaptable, or that the
life fund had accumulated, so to speak? Had the vast succession of
living beings, the long experience in organization, at last made the
problem of the origin of man easier to solve?

One fancies every living thing as not only returning its mineral
elements to the soil, but as in some subtle way leaving its vital
forces also, and thus contributing to the impalpable, invisible
store-house of vital energy of the globe.

At first among the mammalian tribes there was much muscle and little
brains. But in the middle Tertiary the mammal brain began suddenly
to enlarge, so that in our time the brain of the horse is more than
eight times the size of the brain of his progenitor, the dinoceras
of Eocene times.

Nature seems to have experimented with brains and nerve ganglia, as
she has with so many other things. The huge reptilian creatures of
Mesozoic time--the various dinosaurs--had ridiculously small heads
and brains, but they had what might be called supplementary brains
well toward the other end of the body,--great nervous masses near
the sacrum, many times the size of the ostensible brain, which no
doubt performed certain brain functions. But the principle of
centralization was at work, and when in later time we reach the
higher mammalian forms, we find these outlying nervous masses called
in, so to speak, and concentrated in the head.

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