University of Virginia Library

I have found that this expression is not universally understood by those unfamiliar with the language of popular astronomy. Until very recently the distances of the heavenly bodies have been almost universally expressed in numbers referring to the unit of a British mile. The result, of course, is that those distances are made to appear very much more inconceivable than they really are. It is in the numbers of a unit ridiculously inadequate, not in the absolute distance in itself that, very often, the inconceivability lies. The same inconceivability would be the result of measuring our earthly distances by such a unit, for example, as one-tenth of an inch. Upon such a basis of computation the distance between St. Petersburg and Naples might well appear to be inconceivable. The diameter of our globe—or its circumference—treated as a unit in the measurements of celestial distances, would reduce very much the difficulties of conception respecting them. Both of these magnitudes are now easily conceived of as a unit. The length of our planetary orbit would be still more adequate, but it is hardly enough familiar. Yet even the largest of these units ‘die’ in the immensities of sidereal astronomy when they are employed to represent in figures the distances of the stars. Quite recently it has become common to run into the opposite extreme, and to make use, or at least to pretend to make use, of a new unit which is in itself wholly inconceivable—namely, the distance which is traversed by light in one year. We have only to try to compute what this distance is, at the velocity of 186 thousand miles in every second, in order to be convinced that such a unit is practically no aid whatever to our minds in the difficulties of grasping the greatness of sidereal space. Yet even this inconceivable unit is found to need large multipliers to represent, even conventionally, some of the stellar distances.

This stanza refers to, and describes, the most nearly exceptional, and in this sense the most mysterious, of all the organic structures which biological science has been called upon to investigate and explain—namely, the electric organs in certain fishes. It has always appeared to me that they have the very highest interest and value in philosophy. Darwin said of them, ‘It is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced.’ This, in a sense, is true. But it is not impossible at all, on the contrary it is easy and certain, to perceive that certain suggested ‘steps’ cannot possibly be the secret of their production. ‘Natural selection’ cannot possibly have been the process, for the obvious reason that the selective effects of use cannot have come into operation before functional use itself had begun to be. Since the days of Darwin a whole literature has accumulated on the intimate structure of the electric organs, and every investigation goes to prove more and more clearly that the steps of development have been taken through a long course of time, during which functional use lay, as yet, in a distant future. In some fishes they exist already largely developed, and yet not hitherto functionally used. The conclusion is inevitable that the steps of evolution have been taken under the guidance and foreknowledge of Mind, exhibiting all its special attributes as we know and recognise them in ourselves. So conclusive is this argument, and so crucial is the case of the electric organs as an exhibition of it, that Dr. G. J. Romanes has been obliged to admit it, and to escape from its fire by retreating into an assertion that these organs are almost a solitary exception in the whole of nature: ‘So that,’ he says, ‘if there were many other cases of the like kind to be met with in nature, I should myself at once allow that the theory of natural selection would have to be discarded.’ But this is a complete surrender, because nothing is more generally admitted in biological science than that all structures which are apparently exceptional are merely specialised developments of germinal elements which are common to all organic structures; and in this particular case the same conclusion has been established by microscopic dissection, proving the gradual conversion of the ordinary fibre of muscle, and the ordinary structure of nervous tissue, into the specialised apparatus of a battery. The whole theory of development, or evolution, is not only consistent with, but is full of, this principle or law. Not only sometimes, but, so far as we can see, always, germs have included potentially all the elements of structure which could only become of functional use in a future more or less deferred. All nature is thus full of prophecy.

In this stanza the same argument is applied to other cases in the organic world, and especially to the development of flying animals.

This stanza refers to another very special case—that of the Gall Flies (Cynipidæ, &c.), with which I have dealt at some length in the ‘Unity of Nature.’

These lines refer to the case of the ‘Megapodes,’ a family of birds peculiar to, but extending over all, the islands of the Eastern Archipelago from the Philippines to Australia. Unlike any other bird, they neither themselves incubate nor hatch their own eggs, nor do they, like the Cuckoos and some other species, trust them to a foster-parentage. But they lay their eggs in hatching mounds of sand, gravel, and vegetable matter, collected or scraped together by their own feet, and so composed and constructed that the requisite heat is supplied by fermentation. The eggs are so large as to give a special amount of room for the perfect development of the chick before exclusion takes place. The young bird is thus born in a condition to scratch its own way out of the mound, and to run, and fly, and enter at once upon its independent individual life. Although there is some analogy between this and the hatching of reptile eggs which are deposited in the sand, there is this essential difference—that the mounds of the Megapode birds seem to be generally, if not always, constructed in the densest shade available, so that the heat depended upon is not that simply of the sun, but is that due to fermentation in the materials gathered for that purpose by the parent birds. Here we have again a case of genuine inspiration—of intuitive perceptions not reached by reason, but the gift of instinctive powers.

These lines, as will be seen, are paraphrased from many verses in the 49th chapter of the Prophet Isaiah. The ‘newer criticism’ has not yet attempted to bring down the date of these writings to a time within several centuries of the Christian era. Neither can any theory of interpretation explain away the overwhelming extent of correspondence between the vision and its accomplishment in the history and in the triumphs of Christianity. The splendour, and the pathos, and the power, and yet the mystery of the language breathe the very air and spirit of inspiration; and when we remember the intense tribal pride of the Jews, and the contempt which they nursed in their minds against all the Gentile races, it is impossible to connect the idea of such a vision with any natural product of Hebrew preconceptions. All these preconceptions were opposed to such an ending to God's dealings with the world, and the almost invidious comparison which the Prophet draws between the littleness of the narrow country which had been so long identified with all the glories of Israel, and the vast spiritual dominion which was to cover the most distant regions of the earth, with its farthest islands, is a vision of long subsequent events which involves all the elements of that which is now so much questioned—namely, purely predictive prophecy in the very highest, and yet in the most unquestionable form.

The idea that the old ‘argument from design,’ even in the form which it took in the hands of Paley, is tainted with one essential error—namely, that of conceiving of the Deity as a great mechanic, or artificer, making things as we make them, by working on matter as it were from the outside—is an idea which is itself founded on a complete confusion as to the meaning of the word ‘design.’ That word has no necessary reference whatever to any particular kinds of process by which mental purpose may be effected. These may be absolutely various, diffcrent, or even opposite in their nature. But the thing in which design or purpose consists remains wholly unaffected by any amount of difference in the means, or in the methods, which may be employed for the attainment of its aims. This is a distinction which cannot be too much insisted on, if we are to reconcile the irresistible convictions of our own minds in their recognition of design in nature, with the equally obvious fact that the methods of operation are entirely different, pointing as they do to that immanence and ubiquity of Supreme Power which is the highest conclusion alike of philosophy and of faith.

I find that the image presented in these lines does not explain itself easily to those who have never seen our West Highland lochs in the herring fishery season. Arms of the sea such as Loch Fyne, or Loch Hourn, wind their way among the mountains so far that some of their deepest parts may be thirty or forty miles from anything like the open ocean. Their shores are full of land-locked creeks and bays—some of them wooded to the beach; and in these creeks the boats rest in groups at anchor during the day, with fires lighted for cooking purposes, and with wreaths and coils of smoke rising among the hills, all reflected in the glassy water. It has often struck me as an impressive thought that the surface on which these boats thus rested was one continuous surface over the whole globe, and that the farthest and widest spaces of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were equally open and accessible from these creeks although nothing could be seen from them beyond a few encircling rocks and a few overhanging trees of birch, or ash, or pine.

These verses were written under the impulse of a very strong feeling that all but a very few of the obituary poems which appeared in the press on the Laureate's death failed deplorably in even indicating the lofty religious and ethical teaching of his writings. From personal converse with him during a long course of years I know how strongly he clung to the great verities of Christian belief—to a degree all the more striking because of that aloofness which he always maintained as regarded the ordinary questions of mere theological controversy.

Gilbert White was the first discoverer of the larger Willow Wren—now more commonly known as the ‘Wood Wren,’ or (more locally) as the ‘Beech Wren’ (Sylvia sylvicola, Yarrell). This discovery was communicated to Thomas Pennant in a letter dated August 17, 1768, in which he says that he had then before him all the three species of Willow Wren, and describes them severally, both as to plumage and as to song. ‘Shivering a little with its wings when it sings,’ are the words in which he refers to the Wood Wren—a peculiarity to which I have alluded in these verses. The ‘Harvest Mouse’ was another discovery of this eminent naturalist.

In these two verses ‘Scotia’ refers to Ireland, as it always did in those early centuries; whilst the land now called Scotland is named ‘Alba,’ the appellation universally given to it by the Irish missionaries of the Columban age.