Читать книгу Essay on the Theory of the Earth - Georges baron Cuvier - Страница 24

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In our own times, men of still bolder imaginations have exercised their minds upon this great subject. Some writers have revived and greatly extended the ideas of Demaillet. They suppose that every thing was originally fluid; that this fluid gave existence to animals, which were at first of the most simple kind, such as the monads and other infusory and microscopic species; that, in process of time, and by assuming different habits, the races of animals became complicated, and assumed that diversity of nature and character in which they now appear. By means of those various races of animals, part of the waters of the sea have gradually been converted into calcareous earth; while the vegetables, concerning the origin and metamorphoses of which these writers are totally silent, have, on their part, converted a portion of the same water into clay: These two earths, on being stripped of the characters which life had impressed upon them, are resolved, by a final analysis, into silex; and hence the reason that the oldest mountains are more siliceous than the rest. All the solid parts of the earth, therefore, owe their existence to life, and, without life, the globe would still be entirely liquid[22].

Other writers have preferred the ideas of Kepler, and, like that great astronomer, have considered the globe itself as possessed of vital faculties. According to them a vital fluid circulates in it; a process of assimilation goes on in it, as well as in animated bodies; every particle of it is alive; it possesses instinct and volition, even to the most elementary molecules, which attract and repel each other according to sympathies and antipathies. Each kind of mineral has the power of converting immense masses into its own nature, as we convert our food into flesh and blood. The mountains are the respiratory organs of the globe, and the schists its organs of secretion; it is by these latter that it decomposes the water of the sea, in order to produce the matters ejected by volcanoes. The veins are carious sores, abscesses of the mineral kingdom; and the metals are products of rottenness and disease, which is the reason that almost all of them have so bad a smell[23].

More recently still, a philosophy, which substitutes metaphor for reasoning, and proceeds on the system of absolute identity or of pantheism, attributes the production of all phenomena, or which, in the eyes of its supporters, is the same thing, all beings, to polarization, such as is manifested by the two electricities; and denominating every kind of opposition or difference, whether of situation, of nature, or of function, by the title of Polarisation, opposes to each other, in the first place, God and the universe; then, in the universe, the sun and the planets; next, in each planet, the solid and the liquid; and, pursuing this course, changing its figures and allegories according to its necessities, at length arrives at the last details of organic species[24].

It must, however, be observed, that these are what may be termed extreme examples, and that all geologists have not carried the extravagance of their conceptions to such a length as those which we have just cited. Yet, among those who have proceeded with more caution, and have not searched for geological causes beyond the limits of physical and chemical science, much diversity and contradiction still prevail.