The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Hugh Miller

Celacanths were reproduced in many various species, from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone to those of the Chalk; and the Cestracions, which appear in the Upper Ludlow Rocks as the oldest of fishes, continue in at least one species to exist still. It would almost seem as if some such law influenced the destiny of genera in this ichthyic class, as that which we find so often exemplified in our species. The dwarf, or giant, or deformed person, is seldom a long liver;—all the more remarkable instances of longevity have been furnished by individuals cast in the ordinary mould and proportions of the species. Not a few of these primordial ganoids wore, however, of the highest rank and standing ever exemplified by their class; and we find Agassiz boldly assigning a reason for their superiority to their successors, important for the fact which it embodies, and worthy, as coming from him, of our most respectful attention. "It is plain," we find him saying, "that before the class of reptiles was introduced upon our globe, the fishes, being then the only representatives of the type of vertebrata, were invested with the characters of a higher order, embodying, as it were, a prospective view of a higher development in another class, which was introduced as a distinct type only at a later period; and from that time the reptilian character, which had been so prominent in the oldest fishes, was gradually reduced, till in more recent periods, and in the present creation, the fishes lost all this herpetological relationship, and were at last endowed with characters which contrast as much, when compared with those of reptiles, as they agreed closely in the beginning. Lepidosteus alone reminds us in our time of these old-fashioned characters of the class of fishes as it was in former days."

Fig. 58. PLEURACANTHUS LæVISSIMUS. (Coal Measures.) (Half nat. size.)

      The ancient fishes seem to have received their fullest development during the Carboniferous period. Their number was very great: some of them attained to an enormous size, and, though the true reptile had already appeared, they continued to retain, till the close of the system, the high reptilian character and organization. Nothing, however, so impresses the observer as the formidable character of the offensive weapons with which they were furnished, and the amazing strength of their defensive armature. I need scarce say, that the Palæontologist finds no trace in nature of that golden age of the world, of which the poets delighted to sing, when all creatures lived together in unbroken peace, and war and bloodshed were unknown. Ever since animal life began upon our planet, there existed, in all the departments of being, carnivorous classes, who could not live but by the death of their neighbors, and who were armed, in consequence, for their destruction, like the butcher with his axe and knife, and the angler with his hook and spear. But there were certain periods in the history of the past, during which these weapons assumed a more formidable aspect than at others; and never were they more formidable than in the times of the Coal Measures. The teeth of the Rhizodus—a ganoidal fish of our coal fields—were more sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile of the Nile, and in the larger specimens fully four times the bulk and size of the teeth of the hugest reptile of this species that now lives. The dorsal spine of its contemporary, the Gyracanthus, a great placoid, much exceeded in size that of any existing fish: it was a mighty spear head, ornately carved like that of a New Zealand chief, but in a style that, when he first saw a specimen in my collection, greatly excited the admiration of Mr. Ruskin. But one of the most remarkable weapons of the period was the sting of the Pleuracanthus, another great placoid of the age of gigantic fishes. It was sharp and polished as a stiletto, but, from its rounded form and dense structure, of great strength; and along two of its sides, from the taper point to within a few inches of the base, there ran a thickly-set row of barbs, hooked downwards, like the thorns that bristle on the young shoots of the wild rose, and which must have rendered it a weapon not merely of destruction, but also of torture. The defensive armor of the period, especially that of its ganoids, seems to have been us remarkable for its powers of resistance as the offensive must have been for their potency in the assault; and it seems probable that in the great strength of the bony and enamelled armature of this order of fishes we have the secret of the extremely formidable character of the teeth, spines, and stings that coexisted along with it.

Fig. 59. CARCHARIAS PRODUCTUS. Cutting Tooth. (Miocene.)

Fig. 60. PLACODUS GIGAS. Crushing Teeth. (Trias.)

      Such of the fishes of the present time as live on crustacea and the shelled molluscs—such as the Wrasse or rock-fish family, and at least one of the Goby family, the sea-wolf—have an apparatus of crushing teeth greatly more solid and strong than the teeth of such of their contemporaries as are either herbivorous or feed on the weaker families of their own class. A similar remark applies to the ancient sharks, as contrasted with those of later times. So long as the strongly-armed ganoidal order prevailed in nature, the sharks were furnished with massive crushing teeth; but when the ganoids waned in creation, and the soft-scaled cycloid and ctenoid orders took and amply filled the place which they had left vacant, the well known modern form of sharks' teeth was introduced—a form much rather suited for cutting soft bodies than for crushing hard ones. In fine, the offensive weapons of the times of the Coal Measures seem very formidable, just as those personal weapons of the middle ages seem so that were borne at a time when every soldier took the field cased in armor of proof. The slim scimitar or slender rapier would have availed but little against massive iron helmets or mail coats of tempered steel. And so the warriors of the period armed themselves with ponderous maces, battle-axes as massive as hammers, and double-handed swords of great weight and strength.

      Before passing onwards to other and higher classes and orders, as they occurred in creation, permit me to make the formidable armor of the earlier fishes, offensive and defensive, the subject of a single remark. We are told by Goethe, in his autobiography, that he had attained his sixth year when the terrible earthquake at Lisbon took place—"an event," he says, "which greatly disturbed" his "peace of mind for the first time." He could not reconcile a catastrophe so suddenly destructive to thousands, with the ideas which he had already formed for himself of a Providence all-powerful and all-benevolent. But he afterwards learned, he tells us, to recognize in such events the "God of the Old Testament." I know not in what spirit the remark was made; but this I know, that it is the God of the Old Testament whom we see exhibited in all nature and all providence; and that it is at once wisdom and duty in his rational creatures, however darkly they may perceive or imperfectly they may comprehend, to hold in implicit faith that the Adorable Monarch of all the past and of all the future is a King who "can do no wrong." This early exhibition of tooth, and spine, and sting—of weapons constructed alike to cut and to pierce—to unite two of the most indispensable requirements of the modern armorer—a keen edge to a strong back—nay, stranger still, the examples furnished in this primeval time, of weapons formed not only to kill, but also to torture—must be altogether at variance with the preconceived opinions of those who hold that until man appeared in creation, and darkened its sympathetic face with the stain of moral guilt, the reign of violence and outrage did not begin, and that there was no death among the inferior creatures, and no suffering. But preconceived opinion, whether it hold fast, with Lactantius and the old Schoolmen, to the belief that there can be no antipodes, or assert, with Caccini and Bellarmine, that our globe hangs lazily in the midst of the heavens, while the sun moves round it, must yield ultimately to scientific truth. And it is a truth as certain as the existence of a southern hemisphere, or the motion of the earth round both its own axis and the great solar centre, that, untold ages ere man had sinned or suffered, the animal creation exhibited exactly its present state of war—that the strong, armed with formidable weapons, exquisitely constructed to kill, preyed upon the weak; and that the weak, sheathed, many of them, in defensive armor equally admirable in its mechanism, and ever increasing and multiplying upon the earth far beyond the requirements of the mere maintenance of their races, were enabled to escape, as species, the assaults of the tyrant tribes, and to exist unthinned for unreckoned ages. It has been weakly and impiously urged—as if it were merely with the geologist that men had to settle this matter—that such an economy of warfare and