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The Past Condition of Organic Nature By: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) |
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Lecture II. (of VI.), Lectures To Working Men, at the Museum of
Practical Geology, 1863, On Darwin's work: "Origin of Species".
by Thomas H. Huxley
IN the lecture which I delivered last Monday evening, I endeavoured to
sketch in a very brief manner, but as well as the time at my disposal
would permit, the present condition of organic nature, meaning by
that large title simply an indication of the great, broad, and general
principles which are to be discovered by those who look attentively at
the phenomena of organic nature as at present displayed. The general
result of our investigations might be summed up thus: we found that the
multiplicity of the forms of animal life, great as that may be, may be
reduced to a comparatively few primitive plans or types of construction;
that a further study of the development of those different forms
revealed to us that they were again reducible, until we at last brought
the infinite diversity of animal, and even vegetable life, down to the
primordial form of a single cell. We found that our analysis of the organic world, whether animals or
plants, showed, in the long run, that they might both be reduced into,
and were, in fact, composed of, the same constituents. And we saw
that the plant obtained the materials constituting its substance by
a peculiar combination of matters belonging entirely to the inorganic
world; that, then, the animal was constantly appropriating the
nitrogenous matters of the plant to its own nourishment, and returning
them back to the inorganic world, in what we spoke of as its waste; and
that finally, when the animal ceased to exist, the constituents of its
body were dissolved and transmitted to that inorganic world whence they
had been at first abstracted. Thus we saw in both the blade of grass and
the horse but the same elements differently combined and arranged. We
discovered a continual circulation going on, the plant drawing in the
elements of inorganic nature and combining them into food for the animal
creation; the animal borrowing from the plant the matter for its own
support, giving off during its life products which returned immediately
to the inorganic world; and that, eventually, the constituent materials
of the whole structure of both animals and plants were thus returned to
their original source: there was a constant passage from one state of
existence to another, and a returning back again. Lastly, when we endeavoured to form some notion of the nature of the
forces exercised by living beings, we discovered that they if
not capable of being subjected to the same minute analysis as the
constituents of those beings themselves that they were correlative
with that they were the equivalents of the forces of inorganic
nature that they were, in the sense in which the term is now used,
convertible with them. That was our general result. And now, leaving the Present, I must endeavour in the same manner to put
before you the facts that are to be discovered in the Past history of
the living world, in the past conditions of organic nature. We have,
to night, to deal with the facts of that history a history involving
periods of time before which our mere human records sink into utter
insignificance a history the variety and physical magnitude of whose
events cannot even be foreshadowed by the history of human life and
human phenomena a history of the most varied and complex character. We must deal with the history, then, in the first place, as we should
deal with all other histories. The historical student knows that his
first business should be to inquire into the validity of his evidence,
and the nature of the record in which the evidence is contained, that
he may be able to form a proper estimate of the correctness of the
conclusions which have been drawn from that evidence. So, here, we must
pass, in the first place, to the consideration of a matter which may
seem foreign to the question under discussion. We must dwell upon the
nature of the records, and the credibility of the evidence they contain;
we must look to the completeness or incompleteness of those records
themselves, before we turn to that which they contain and reveal... Continue reading book >>
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