Principles of Geology Part 55

These small bodies here represented, which bear a considerable resemblance to the fry of the univalve, or gasteropodous sh.e.l.ls above mentioned, are so minute at first as to be just visible to the naked eye. They begin to move about from the moment they are hatched, by means of the long cilia, _a_, _a_, placed on the edges of the locomotive disk or velum. This disk shrinks up as they increase in size, and gradually disappears, no trace of it being visible in the perfect animal.

Some species of sh.e.l.l-bearing Mollusca lay their eggs in a sponge-like nidus, wherein the young remain enveloped for a time after their birth; and this buoyant substance floats far and wide as readily as sea-weed.

The young of other viviparous tribes are often borne along entangled in sea-weed. Sometimes they are so light, that, like grains of sand, they can be easily moved by currents. Balani and Serpulae are sometimes found adhering to floating cocoa-nuts, and even to fragments of pumice. In rivers and lakes, on the other hand, aquatic univalves usually attach their eggs to leaves and sticks which have fallen into the water, and which are liable to be swept away during floods, from tributaries to the main streams, and from thence to all parts of the same basins.

Particular species may thus migrate during one season from the head waters of the Mississippi, or any other great river, to countries bordering the sea, at the distance of many thousand miles.

An ill.u.s.tration of the mode of attachment of these eggs will be seen in the annexed cut. (Fig. 100.)

The habit of some Testacea to adhere to floating wood is proved by their fixing themselves to the bottoms of s.h.i.+ps. By this mode of conveyance _Mytilus polymorphus_, previously known only in the Danube and Wolga, may have been brought to the Commercial Docks in the Thames, and to Hamburgh, where the species is now domiciled. But Mr. Gray suggests that as the animal is known to have the faculty of living for a very long time out of water, it is more probable that it was brought in Russian timber, than borne uninjured through the salt water at the bottom of a vessel.[921]

A lobster (_Astacus marinus_) was lately taken alive covered with living mussels (_Mytilus edulis_)[922]; and a large female crab (_Cancer pagurus_), covered with oysters, and bearing also _Anomia ephippium_, and Actiniae, was taken in April, 1832, off the English coast. The oysters, seven in number, include individuals of six years' growth, and the two largest are four inches long and three inches and a half broad.

Both the crab and the oysters were seen alive by Mr. Robert Brown.[923]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 100.

Eggs of Freshwater mollusks.

Fig. 1. Eggs of _Ampullaria ovata_ (a fluviatile species) fixed to a small sprig which had fallen into the water.

Fig. 2. Eggs of _Planorbis albus_, attached to a dead leaf lying under water.

Fig. 3. Eggs of the common Limneus (_L. vulgaris_), adhering to a dead stick under water.

From this example we learn the manner in which oysters may be diffused over every part of the sea where the crab wanders; and if they are at length carried to a spot where there is nothing but fine mud, the foundation of a new oyster-bank may be laid on the death of the crab. In this instance the oysters survived the crab many days, and were killed at last only by long exposure to the air.

_Geographical Distribution and Migrations of Zoophytes._

Zoophytes are very imperfectly known; but there can be little doubt that each maritime region possesses species peculiar to itself. The Madrepores, or lamelliferous Polyparia, are found in their fullest development only in the tropical seas of Polynesia and the East and West Indies; and this family is represented only by a few species in our seas. The zoophytes of the Mediterranean, according to Ehrenberg, differ almost entirely from those of the Red Sea, although only seventy miles distant. Out of 120 species of Anthozoa, only two are common to both seas.[924] Peron and Lesueur, after studying the Holothuriae, Medusae, and other congeners of delicate and changeable forms, came to the conclusion that each kind has its place of residence determined by the temperature necessary to support its existence. Thus, for example, they found the abode of _Pyrosoma Atlantica_ to be confined to one particular region of the Atlantic Ocean.[925]

Let us now inquire how the transportation of zoophytes from one part of the globe to another is effected. Many of them, as in the families Fl.u.s.tra and Sertularia, attach themselves to sea-weed, and are occasionally drifted along with it. Many fix themselves to the sh.e.l.ls of Mollusca, and are thus borne along by them to short distances. Others, like some species of sea-pens, float about in the ocean, and are usually believed to possess powers of spontaneous motion. But the most frequent mode of transportation consists in the buoyancy of their eggs, or certain small vesicles, which are detached, and are capable of becoming the foundation of a new colony. These gems, as they are called, have, in many instances, a locomotive power of their own, by which they proceed in a determinate direction for several days after separation from the parent. They are propelled by means of numerous short threads or _ciliae_, which are in constant and rapid vibration; and, when thus supported in the water, they may be borne along by currents to a great distance.

That some zoophytes adhere to floating bodies, is proved by their being found attached to the bottoms of s.h.i.+ps, like certain Testacea before alluded to.

_Geographical Distribution and Migrations of Insects._

Before I conclude this sketch of the manner in which the habitable parts of the earth are shared out among particular a.s.semblages of organic beings, I must offer a few remarks on insects, which, by their numbers and the variety of their powers and instincts, exert a prodigious influence in the economy of animate nature. As a large portion of these minute creatures are strictly dependent for their subsistence on certain species of vegetables, the entomological provinces must coincide in considerable degree with the botanical.

All the insects, says Latreille, brought from the eastern parts of Asia and China, whatever be their lat.i.tude and temperature, are distinct from those of Europe and of Africa. The insects of the United States, although often approaching very close to our own, are, with very few exceptions, specifically distinguishable by some characters. In South America, the equinoctial lands of New Granada and Peru on the one side, and of Guiana on the other, contain for the most part distinct groups; the Andes forming the division, and interposing a narrow line of severe cold between climates otherwise very similar.[926]

_Migratory instincts._--Nearly all the insects of the United States and Canada, differ specifically from the European; while those of Greenland appear to be in a great measure identical with our own. Some insects are very local; while a few, on the contrary, are common to remote countries, between which the torrid zone and the ocean intervene. Thus our painted lady b.u.t.terfly (_Vanessa cardui_) re-appears at the Cape of Good Hope and in New Holland and j.a.pan with scarcely a varying streak.[927] The same species is said to be one of the few insects which are universally dispersed over the earth, being found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America; and its wide range is the more interesting, because it seems explained by its migratory instinct, seconded, no doubt, by a capacity, enjoyed by few species, of enduring a great diversity of temperature.

A vast swarm of this species, forming a column from ten to fifteen feet broad, was, a few years since, observed in the Canton de Vaud; they traversed the country with great rapidity from north to south, all flying onwards in regular order, close together, and not turning from their course on the approach of other objects. Professor Bonelli, of Turin, observed, in March of the same year, a similar swarm of the same species, also directing their flight from north to south, in Piedmont, in such immense numbers that at night the flowers were literally covered with them. They had been traced from Coni, Raconi, Susa, &c. A similar flight at the end of the last century is recorded by M. Louch in the Memoirs of the Academy of Turin. The fact is the more worthy of notice, because the caterpillars of this b.u.t.terfly are not gregarious, but solitary from the moment that they are hatched; and this instinct remains dormant, while generation after generation pa.s.ses away, till it suddenly displays itself in full energy when their numbers happen to be in excess.

Not only peculiar species, but certain types, distinguish particular countries; and there are groups, observes Kirby, which represent each other in distant regions, whether in their form, their functions, or in both. Thus the honey and wax of Europe, Asia, and Africa, are in each case prepared by bees congenerous with our common hive-bee (_Apis_, Latr.); while, in America, this genus is nowhere indigenous, but is replaced by Melipona, Trigona, and Euglossa; and in New Holland by a still different but undescribed type.[928] The European bee (_Apis mellifica_), although not a native of the new world, is now established both in North and South America. It was introduced into the United States by some of the early settlers, and has since overspread the vast forests of the interior, building hives in the decayed trunks of trees.

"The Indians," says Irving, "consider them as the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man, and say that in proportion as the bee advances the Indian and the buffalo retire. It is said," continues the same writer, "that the wild bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier, and that they have always been the heralds of civilization, preceding it as it advanced from the Atlantic borders. Some of the ancient settlers of the west even pretend to give the very year when the honey-bee first crossed the Mississippi."[929]

The same species is now also naturalized in Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand.

As almost all insects are winged, they can readily spread themselves wherever their progress is not opposed by uncongenial climates, or by seas, mountains, and other physical impediments; and these barriers they can sometimes surmount by abandoning themselves to violent winds, which, as I before stated, when speaking of the dispersion of seeds (p. 618.), may in a few hours carry them to very considerable distances. On the Andes some sphinxes and flies have been observed by Humboldt, at the height of 19,180 feet above the sea, and which appeared to him to have been involuntarily carried into these regions by ascending currents of air.[930]

White mentions a remarkable shower of aphides which seem to have emigrated, with an east wind, from the great hop plantations of Kent and Suss.e.x, and blackened the shrubs and vegetables where they alighted at Selbourne, spreading at the same time in great clouds all along the vale from Farnham to Alton. These aphides are sometimes accompanied by vast numbers of the common lady-bird (_Coccinella septempunctata_), which feed upon them.[931]

It is remarkable, says Kirby, that many of the insects which are occasionally observed to emigrate, as, for instance, the Libellulae, Coccinellae, Carabi, Cicadae, &c. are not usually social insects; but seem to congregate, like swallows, merely for the purpose of emigration.[932]

Here, therefore, we have an example of an instinct developing itself on certain rare emergencies, causing unsocial species to become gregarious and to venture sometimes even to cross the ocean.

The armies of locusts which darken the air in Africa, and traverse the globe from Turkey to our southern counties in England, are well known to all. When the western gales sweep over the Pampas they bear along with them myriads of insects of various kinds. As a proof of the manner in which species may be thus diffused, I may mention that when the Creole frigate was lying in the outer roads off Buenos Ayres, in 1819, at the distance of six miles from the land, her decks and rigging were suddenly covered by thousands of flies and grains of sand. The sides of the vessel had just received a fresh coat of paint, to which the insects adhered in such numbers as to spot and disfigure the vessel, and to render it necessary partially to renew the paint.[933] Captain W. H.

Smyth was obliged to repaint his vessel, the Adventure, in the Mediterranean, from the same cause. He was on his way from Malta to Tripoli, when a southern wind blowing from the coast of Africa, then one hundred miles distant, drove such myriads of flies upon the fresh paint, that not the smallest point was left unoccupied by insects.

To the southward of the river Plate, off Cape St. Antonio, and at the distance of fifty miles from land, several large dragon-flies alighted on the Adventure frigate, during Captain King's late expedition to the Straits of Magellan. If the wind abates when insects are thus crossing the sea, the most delicate species are not necessarily drowned; for many can repose without sinking on the water. The slender long-legged tipulae have been seen standing on the surface of the sea, when driven out far from our coast, and took wing immediately on being approached.[934]

Exotic beetles are sometimes thrown on our sh.o.r.e, which revive after having been long drenched in salt water; and the periodical appearance of some conspicuous b.u.t.terflies amongst us, after being unseen some for five others for fifty years, has been ascribed, not without probability, to the agency of the winds.

Inundations of rivers, observes Kirby, if they happen at any season except in the depths of winter, always carry down a number of insects, floating on the surface of bits of stick, weeds, &c.; so that when the waters subside, the entomologist may generally reap a plentiful harvest.

In the dissemination, moreover, of these minute beings, as in that of plants, the larger animals play their part. Insects are, in numberless instances, borne along in the coats of animals, or the feathers of birds; and the eggs of some species are capable, like seeds, of resisting the digestive powers of the stomach, and after they are swallowed with herbage, may be ejected again unharmed in the dung.

_Geographical Distribution and Diffusion of Man._

I have reserved for the last some observations on the range and diffusion of the human species over the earth, and the influence of man in spreading other animals and plants, especially the terrestrial.

Many naturalists have amused themselves in speculating on the probable birth-place of mankind, the point from which, if we a.s.sume the whole human race to have descended from a single pair, the tide of emigration must originally have proceeded. It has been always a favorite conjecture, that this birth-place was situated within or near the tropics, where perpetual summer reigns, and where fruits, herbs, and roots are plentifully supplied throughout the year. The climate of these regions, it has been said, is suited to a being born without any covering, and who had not yet acquired the arts of building habitations or providing clothes.

_Progress of Human Population._--"The hunter state," it has been argued, "which Montesquieu placed the first, was probably only the second stage to which mankind arrived; since so many arts must have been invented to catch a salmon, or a deer, that society could no longer have been in its infancy when they came into use."[935] When regions where the spontaneous fruits of the earth abound became overpeopled, men would naturally diffuse themselves over the neighboring parts of the temperate zone; but a considerable time would probably elapse before this event took place; and it is possible, as a writer before cited observes, that in the interval before the multiplication of their numbers and their increasing wants had compelled them to emigrate, some arts to take animals were invented, but far inferior to what we see practised at this day among savages. As their habitations gradually advanced into the temperate zone, the new difficulties they had to encounter would call forth by degrees the spirit of invention, and the probability of such inventions always rises with the number of people involved in the same necessity.[936]

A distinguished modern writer, who coincides for the most part in the views above mentioned, has introduced one of the persons in his second dialogue, as objecting to the theory of the human race having gradually advanced from a savage to a civilized state, on the ground that "the first man must have inevitably been destroyed by the elements or devoured by savage beasts, so infinitely his superiors in physical force."[937] He then contends against the difficulty here started by various arguments, all of which were, perhaps, superfluous; for if a philosopher is pleased to indulge in conjectures on this subject, why should he not a.s.sign, as the original seat of man, some one of those large islands within the tropics, which are as free from large beasts of prey as Van Diemen's Land or Australia? Here man may have remained for a period, peculiar to a single island, just as some of the large anthropomorphous species are now limited to one island within the tropics. In such a situation, the new-born race might have lived in security, though far more helpless than the New Holland savages, and might have found abundance of vegetable food. Colonies may afterwards have been sent forth from this mother country, and then the peopling of the earth may have proceeded according to the hypothesis before alluded to.

To form a probable conjecture respecting the country from whence the early civilization of India was derived, has been found almost as difficult as to determine the original birth-place of the human race.

That the dawn of oriental civilization did not arise within the limits of the tropics, is the conclusion to which Baron William von Humboldt has come after much patient research into "the diversities of the structure of language and their influence on the mental development of the human race." According to him the ancient Zend country from whence the spread of knowledge and the arts has been traced in a south-easterly direction, lay to the north-west of the upper Indus.[938]

As to the time of the first appearance of man upon the earth, if we are to judge from the discordance of opinion amongst celebrated chronologers, not even a rude approximation has yet been made towards determining a point of so much interest. The problem seems. .h.i.therto to have baffled the curiosity of the antiquary, if possible, more completely than the fixing on a geographical site for the original habitation of the ancestors of the human race. The Chevalier Bunsen, in his elaborate and philosophical work on Ancient Egypt,[939] has satisfied not a few of the learned, by an appeal to monumental inscriptions still extant, that the successive dynasties of kings may be traced back without a break, to Menes, and that the date of his reign would correspond with the year 3640 B. C. He supposes at the same time, what is most reasonable, that the Egyptian people must have existed for a long period (probably at least for five centuries), in their earlier and less settled state, before they reached the point of civilization at which Menes consolidated them into a great and united empire. This would carry us back to upwards of 4000 years B. C., or to an epoch coincident with that commonly set down for the creation of the world in accordance with computations founded on the combined ages of the successive antediluvian patriarchs. It follows that the same epoch of Menes is anterior by a great many centuries to the most ancient of the dates usually fixed upon for the Mosaic deluge. The fact that no record or tradition of any great and overwhelming flood has been detected in the mythology, or monumental annals of the Egyptians, will suggest many reflections to a geologist who has weighed well the evidence we possess of a variety of partial deluges which have happened in districts not free like Egypt, for the last 3000 years, from earthquakes and other causes of great aqueous catastrophes. The tales and legends of calamitous floods preserved in Greece, Asia Minor, the southern sh.o.r.es of the Baltic, China, Peru, and Chili, have, as we have seen, been all of them handed down to us by the inhabitants of regions in which the operation of natural causes in modern times, and the recurrence of a succession of disastrous floods, afford us data for interpreting the meaning of the obscure traditions of an illiterate age.[940]

In his learned treatise on ancient chronology, Dr. Hales has selected, from a much greater number, a list of no less than 120 authors, all of whom give a different period for the epoch of the creation of the world, the extreme range of difference between them amounting to no less than 3268 years. It appears that even amongst authorities, who in England are generally regarded, as orthodox, there is a variance, not of years or of one or two centuries, but of upwards of a millennium, according as they have preferred to follow the Hebrew, or the Samaritan, or the Greek versions of the Mosaic writings. Can we then wonder that they who decipher the monuments of Egypt, or the geologist who interprets the earth's autobiography, should arrive at views respecting the date of an ancient empire, or the age of our planet, irreconcilable with every one of these numerous and conflicting chronologies? The want of agreement amongst the learned in regard to the probable date of the deluge of Noah is a source of far greater perplexity and confusion than our extreme uncertainty as to the epoch of the creation,--the deluge being a comparatively modern event, from which the repeopling of the earth and the history of the present races of mankind is made to begin.

Naturalists have long felt that to render probable the received opinion that all the leading varieties of the human family have originally sprung from a single pair, (a doctrine against which there appears to me to be no sound objection,) a much greater lapse of time is required for the slow and gradual formation of races, (such as the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro,) than is embraced in any of the popular systems of chronology. The existence of two of those marked varieties above mentioned can be traced back 3000 years before the present time, or to the painting of pictures, preserved in the tombs or on the walls of buried temples in Egypt. In these we behold the Negro and Caucasian physiognomies portrayed as faithfully and in as strong contrast as if the likenesses of those races had been taken yesterday. When we consider therefore the extreme slowness of the changes, which climate and other modifying causes have produced in modern times, we must allow for a vast series of antecedent ages, in the course of which the long-continued influence of similar external circ.u.mstances gave rise to peculiarities, probably increased in many successive generations, until they were fixed by hereditary transmission. The characteristic forms and features thus acquired by certain tribes, may have been afterwards diffused by migration from a few centres over wide continental s.p.a.ces. The theory, therefore, that all the races of man have come from one common stock receives support from every investigation which forces us to expand our ideas of the duration of past time, or which multiplies the number of years that have pa.s.sed away since the origin of man. Hitherto, geology has neither enlarged nor circ.u.mscribed the "human period;" but simply proved that in the history of animated nature it is comparatively modern, or the last of a long series of antecedent epochs, in each of which the earth has been successively peopled by distinct species of animals and plants.

In an early stage of society the necessity of hunting acts as a principle of repulsion, causing men to spread with the greatest rapidity over a country, until the whole is covered with scattered settlements.

It has been calculated that eight hundred acres of hunting-ground produce only as much food as half an acre of arable land. When the game has been in a great measure exhausted, and a state of pasturage succeeds, the several hunter tribes, being already scattered, may multiply in a short time into the greatest number which the pastoral state is capable of sustaining. The necessity, says Brand, thus imposed upon the two savage states, of dispersing themselves far and wide over the country, affords a reason why, at a very early period, the worst parts of the earth may have become inhabited.

But this reason, it may be said, is only applicable in as far as regards the peopling of a continuous continent; whereas the smallest islands, however remote from continents, have almost always been found inhabited by man. St. Helena, it is true, afforded an exception; for when that island was discovered in 1501, it was only inhabited by sea-fowl, and occasionally by seals and turtles, and was covered with a forest of trees and shrubs, all of species peculiar to it, with one or two exceptions, and which seem to have been expressly created for this remote and insulated spot.[941]

The islands also of Mauritius, Bourbon, Pitcairns, and Juan Fernandez, and those of the Galapagos archipelago, one of which is seventy miles long, were inhabited when first discovered, and, what is more remarkable than all, the Falkland Islands, which together are 120 miles in length by 60 in breadth, and abounding in food fit for the support of man.

_Drifting of canoes to vast distances._--But very few of the numerous coral islets and volcanoes of the vast Pacific, capable of sustaining a few families of men, have been found untenanted; and we have, therefore, to inquire whence and by what means, if all the members of the great human family have had one common source, could those savages have migrated. Cook, Forster, and others, have remarked that parties of savages in their canoes must have often lost their way, and must have been driven on distant sh.o.r.es, where they were forced to remain, deprived both of the means and of the requisite intelligence for returning to their own country. Thus Captain Cook found on the island of Wateoo three inhabitants of Otaheite, who had been drifted thither in a canoe, although the distance between the two isles is 550 miles. In 1696, two canoes, containing thirty persons, who had left Ancorso, were thrown by contrary winds and storms on the island of Samar, one of the Philippines, at a distance of 800 miles. In 1721, two canoes, one of which contained twenty-four, and the other six persons, men, women, and children, were drifted from an island called Farroilep to the island of Guaham, one of the Marians, a distance of 200 miles.[942]

Kotzebue, when investigating the Coral Isles of Radack, at the eastern extremity of the Caroline Isles, became acquainted with a person of the name of Kadu, who was a native of Ulea, an isle 1500 miles distant, from which he had been drifted with a party. Kadu and three of his countrymen one day left Ulea in a sailing boat, when a violent storm arose, and drove them out of their course: they drifted about the open sea for eight months, according to their reckoning by the moon, making a knot on a cord at every new moon. Being expert fishermen, they subsisted entirely on the produce of the sea; and when the rain fell, laid in as much fresh water as they had vessels to contain it. "Kadu," says Kotzebue, "who was the best diver, frequently went down to the bottom of the sea, where it is well known that the water is not so salt, with a cocoa-nut sh.e.l.l, with only a small opening."[943] When these unfortunate men reached the isles of Radack, every hope and almost every feeling had died within them; their sail had long been destroyed, their canoe had long been the sport of winds and waves, and they were picked up by the inhabitants of Aur in a state of insensibility; but by the hospitable care of those islanders they soon recovered, and were restored to perfect health.[944]