by John Carey
But what is so desperately wrong with Omphalos? Only this really (and perhaps paradoxically): that we can devise no way to find out whether it is wrong – or, for that matter, right. Omphalos is the classical example of an utterly untestable notion, for the world will look exactly the same in all its intricate detail whether fossils and strata are prochronic or products of an extended history. When we realize that Omphalos must be rejected for this methodological absurdity, not for any demonstrated factual inaccuracy, then we will understand science as a way of knowing, and Omphalos will serve its purpose as an intellectual foil or prod.
Science is a procedure for testing and rejecting hypotheses, not a compendium of certain knowledge. Claims that can be proved incorrect lie within its domain (as false statements to be sure, but as proposals that meet the primary methodological criterion of testability). But theories that cannot be tested in principle are not part of science. Science is doing, not clever cogitation; we reject Omphalos as useless, not wrong.
Gosse’s deep error lay in his failure to appreciate this essential character of scientific reasoning. He hammered his own coffin nails by continually emphasizing that Omphalos made no practical difference – that the world would look exactly the same with a prochronic or diachronic past. (Gosse thought that this admission would make his argument acceptable to conventional geologists; he never realized that it could only lead them to reject his entire scheme as irrelevant.) ‘I do not know,’ he wrote, ‘that a single conclusion, now accepted, would need to be given up, except that of actual chronology.’
Gosse emphasized that we cannot know where God placed his wafer of creation into the cosmic circle because prochronic objects, created ab nihilo, look exactly like diachronic products of actual time. To those who argued that coprolites (fossil excrement) prove the existence of active, feeding animals in a real geological past, Gosse replied that as God would create adults with feces in their intestines, so too would he place petrified turds into his created strata. (I am not making up this example for comic effect; you will find it on page 353 of Omphalos.) Thus, with these words, Gosse sealed his fate and placed himself outside the pale of science:
Now, again I repeat, there is no imaginable difference to sense between the prochronic and the diachronic development. Every argument by which the physiologist can prove to demonstration that yonder cow was once a foetus in the uterus of its dam, will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created cow was an embryo, some years before its creation … There is, and can be, nothing in the phenomena to indicate a commencement there, any more than anywhere else, or indeed, anywhere at all. The commencement, as a fact, I must learn from testimony; I have no means whatever of inferring it from phenomena.
Gosse was emotionally crushed by the failure of Omphalos. During the long winter evenings of his discontent, in the January cold of 1858, he sat by the fire with his eight-year-old son, trying to ward off bitter thoughts by discussing the grisly details of past and current murders. Young Edmund heard of Mrs Manning, who buried her victim in quicklime and was hanged in black satin; of Burke and Hare, the Scottish ghouls; and of the ‘carpetbag mystery,’ a sackful of neatly butchered human parts hung from a pier on Waterloo Bridge. This may not have been the most appropriate subject for an impressionable lad (Edmund was, by his own memory, ‘nearly frozen into stone with horror’), yet I take some comfort in the thought that Philip Henry Gosse, smitten with the pain of rejection for his untestable theory, could take refuge in something so unambiguously factual, so utterly concrete.
Source: Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1983.
Submarine Gardens of Eden: Devon, 1858–9
Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was eight years old when, following his mother’s death from cancer, he and his father Philip (see p. 95) moved to the village of Marychurch in Devon, where Philip worked on his History of the British Sea Anemones and Corals (1860). It was Philip Gosse’s bestseller The Aquarium (a word he coined) that had started the mid-Victorian passion for sea-shore collecting, which Edmund complains of in this extract from Father and Son.
It was down on the shore, tramping along the pebbled terraces of the beach, clambering over the great blocks of fallen conglomerate which broke the white curve with rufous promontories that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over those shallow tidal pools in the limestone rocks which were our proper hunting-ground, – it was in such circumstances as these that my Father became most easy, most happy, most human. That hard look across his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and unupbraiding. Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected in the dark hyaline and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of oar-weed there used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the presumption to say, equally well prepared for business.
If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed-curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, orange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.
Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water’s edge is wrought into crevices and hollows, the tide-line was, like Keats’ Grecian vase, ‘a still unravished bride of quietness’. These cups and basins were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only way in which they were affected was that twice in the twenty-four hours they were replenished by cold streams from the great sea, and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate movement of the upper air. They were living flower-beds, so exquisite in their perfection, that my Father, in spite of his scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began to rifle them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock-pools, and the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea-anemones, sea-weeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my Father’s fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no one had ever thought of intruding before; and if the Garden of Eden had been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw – the great prawns gliding like transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the dulse faintly streaming on the water, like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere.
All this is long over, and done with. The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, – they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied and vulgarized. An army of ‘collectors’ has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submar
ine vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple.
In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began early in 1858, they reached their greatest intensity in the summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, so far as my Father was concerned, until nearly twenty years later. But it was while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to knowledge, his History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals, that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose, and the last instalment of that still-classic volume was ready for press by the close of 1859.
The way in which my Father worked, in his most desperate escapades, was to wade breast-high into one of the huge pools, and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below the brim. In such remote places – spots where I could never venture, being left, a slightly timorous Andromeda, chained to a safer level of the cliff – in these extreme basins, there used often to lurk a marvellous profusion of animal and vegetable forms. My Father would search for the roughest and most corroded points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of creatures, and would then chisel off fragments as low down in the water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged in the salt water of jars which we had brought with us for the purpose. When as much had been collected as we could carry away – my Father always dragged about an immense square basket, the creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear – we turned to trudge up the long climb home. Then all our prizes were spread out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean sea-water.
In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and what living creatures we had brought seemed to have recovered their composure, my work began. My eyes were extremely keen and powerful, though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no use in examining objects at any distance, in investigating a minute surface my vision was trained to be invaluable. The shallow pan, with our spoils, would rest on a table near the window, and I, kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would lean over the surface till everything was within an inch or two of my eyes. Often I bent, in my zeal, so far forward that the water touched the tip of my nose and gave me a little icy shock. In this attitude – an idle spectator might have formed the impression that I was trying to wash my head and could not quite summon up resolution enough to plunge – in this odd pose I would remain for a long time, holding my breath and examining with extreme care every atom of rock, every swirl of detritus. This was a task which my Father could only perform by the help of a lens, with which, of course, he took care to supplement my examination. But that my survey was of use, he has himself most handsomely testified in his Actinologia Britannica, where he expresses his debt to the ‘keen and well-practised eye of my little son’. Nor, if boasting is not to be excluded, is it every eminent biologist, every proud and masterful F.R.S., who can lay his hand on his heart and swear that, before reaching the age of ten years, he had added, not merely a new species, but a new genus to the British fauna. That however, the author of these pages can do, who, on 29 June 1859, discovered a tiny atom, – and ran in the greatest agitation to announce the discovery of that object ‘as a form with which he was unacquainted’, – which figures since then on all lists of sea-anemones as phellia murocincta, or the walled corklet. Alas! that so fair a swallow should have made no biological summer in afterlife.
Source: Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, London, Heinemann, 1907.
In Praise of Rust
Besides being the greatest British art critic, a superb draughtsman and a pioneer social reformer, John Ruskin (1819–1900) was a keen amateur geologist. He believed that scientific knowledge (of rocks, botanical forms, clouds) was essential for artists. This excerpt is from a lecture he gave at Tunbridge Wells (hence the reference to ‘your spring’) in 1858.
You will probably know that the ochreous stain, which, perhaps, is often thought to spoil the basin of your spring, is iron in a state of rust: and when you see rusty iron in other places you generally think, not only that it spoils the places it stains, but that it is spoiled itself – that rusty iron is spoiled iron.
For most of our uses it generally is so; and because we cannot use a rusty knife or razor so well as a polished one, we suppose it to be a great defect in iron that it is subject to rust. But not at all. On the contrary, the most perfect and useful state of it is that ochreous stain; and therefore it is endowed with so ready a disposition to get itself into that state. It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to be so fond of getting rusted, for in that condition it fulfils its most important functions in the universe, and most kindly duties to mankind. Nay, in a certain sense, and almost a literal one, we may say that iron rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, Dead. You all probably know that in the mixed air we breathe, the part of it essentially needful to us is called oxygen; and that this substance is to all animals, in the most accurate sense of the word, ‘breath of life’ [Genesis 2:7]. The nervous power of life is a different thing; but the supporting element of the breath, without which the blood, and therefore the life, cannot be nourished, is this oxygen. Now it is this very same air which the iron breathes when it gets rusty. It takes the oxygen from the atmosphere as eagerly as we do, though it uses it differently. The iron keeps all that it gets; we, and other animals, part with it again; but the metal absolutely keeps what it has once received of this aërial gift; and the ochreous dust which we so much despise is, in fact, just so much nobler than pure iron, in so far as it is iron and the air. Nobler, and more useful – for, indeed, as I shall be able to show you presently – the main service of this metal, and of all other metals, to us, is not in making knives, and scissors, and pokers, and pans, but in making the ground we feed from, and nearly all the substances first needful to our existence. For these are all nothing but metals and oxygen – metals with breath put into them. Sand, lime, clay, and the rest of the earths – potash and soda, and the rest of the alkalies – are all of them metals which have undergone this, so to speak, vital change, and have been rendered fit for the service of man by permanent unity with the purest air which he himself breathes. There is only one metal which does not rust readily; and that in its influence on Man hitherto, has caused Death rather than Life; it will not be put to its right use till it is made a pavement of, and so trodden under foot.
Is there not something striking in this fact, considered largely as one of the types, or lessons, furnished by the inanimate creation? Here you have your hard, bright, cold, lifeless metal – good enough for swords and scissors – but not for food. You think, perhaps, that your iron is wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire – if all your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel – if the whole earth, instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower, showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine – a globe of black, lifeless, excoriated metal? It would be that, – probably it was once that; but assuredly it would be, were it not that all the substance of which it is made sucks and breathes the brilliancy of the atmosphere; and, as it breathes, softening from its merciless hardness, it falls into fruitful and beneficent dust; gathering itself again into the earths from which we feed, and the stones with which we build; – into the rocks that frame the mountains, and the sands that bind the sea.
Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ‘I am not earth – I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me; it is all my life – without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing; I could not minister to you, nor nourish you – I should be a cruel and hel
pless thing; but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality.’
Thus far the same interest attaches to all the earths, and all the metals of which they are made; but a deeper interest and larger beneficence belong to that ochreous earth of iron which stains the marble of your springs. It stains much besides that marble. It stains the great earth wheresoever you can see it, far and wide – it is the colouring substance appointed to colour the globe for the sight, as well as subdue it to the service of man. You have just seen your hills covered with snow, and, perhaps, have enjoyed, at first, the contrast of their fair white with the dark blocks of pine woods; but have you ever considered how you would like them always white – not pure white, but dirty white – the white of thaw, with all the chill of snow in it, but none of its brightness? That is what the colour of the earth would be without its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only, but in all places, and at all times. Follow out that idea till you get it in some detail. Think first of your pretty gravel walks in your gardens, and fine, like plots of sunshine between the yellow flower-beds; fancy them all suddenly turned to the colour of ashes. That is what they would be without iron ochre. Think of your winding walks over the common, as warm to the eye as they are dry to the foot, and imagine them all laid down suddenly with gray cinders. Then pass beyond the common into the country, and pause at the first ploughed field that you see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its deep brown furrows, and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved aside by the ploughshare, like deep folds of a mantle of russet velvet – fancy it all changed suddenly into grisly furrows in a field of mud. That is what it would be without iron. Pass on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending line of the sea shore; go down upon its breezy beach – watch the white foam flashing among the amber of it, and all the blue sea embayed in belts of gold: then fancy those circlets of far sweeping shore suddenly put into mounds of mourning – all those golden sands turned into gray slime; the fairies no more able to call to each other, ‘Come unto these yellow sands’; [The Tempest, I: ii: 376] but, ‘Come unto these drab sands.’ That is what they would be, without iron.