If we can conceive no end of space, why should we conceive an end of new creations, whatever our poor little bounds of historical time might even appear to argue to the contrary.
-- Leigh Hunt, 1836
Part I
Great literary geniuses often possess an ear or a sensitivity for things in the process of becoming, for ideas which are just about to be born. It is interesting in this connection to compare the remarks of Charles Darwin with certain observations on science made at a much earlier date by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Darwin, in his autobiography, protests that he saw no evidence that the subject of evolution was "in the air" of his time. "I occasionally sounded out not a few naturalists," he remarks, "and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species."
By way of contrast, we may note that Coleridge, in a philosophical lecture delivered as early as 1819, makes reference to a belief which "has become quite common even among Christian people, that the human race arose from a state of savagery and then gradually from a monkey came up through various states to be man." Coleridge was not an evolutionist. He is, however, sensitive to a new doctrine, whose presence "in the air" Darwin had failed to discover. He observes in a very shrewd fashion what we have sought to emphasize in previous chapters; namely, the way in which the intellectual climate of a given period may unconsciously retard or limit the theoretical ventures of an exploring scientist. "Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy during the last two or three centuries," contended the great poet, "cannot but admit, that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of free thought so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit."
Coleridge is here recognizing a fact which escaped the simpler and less philosophically oriented mind of Darwin. The latter had failed to recognize that the silence of his professional colleagues was in some cases just such a restriction as that of which Coleridge speaks. Religious and social pressures had all contributed to making the subject of evolution somewhat taboo and not really in good taste to discuss in public. Time and again one finds naturalists circling all about the subject and then withdrawing timidly from any attempt to derive the final, and what now seems to us the logical, conclusion. Some, in fact, openly contradict themselves in order to stay within the accepted circle of traditional thought.
The entomologist T. Vernon Wollaston is a case in point. In his book On the Variation of Species, published in 1856 -- a volume from which Darwin drew material favorable to the evolutionary point of view -- Wollaston dwells sporadically upon organic change. We are led to believe, he says, "that, could the entire living panorama, in all its magnificence and breadth, be spread before our eyes, with its long lost links [of the past and present epochs] replaced, it would be found, from first to last, to be complete and continuous throughout, -- a very marvel of perfection, the work of the Master's Hand ... From first to last," he contends, "the same truth is re-echoed to our mind, that here all is change." Yet after making these and other suggestive remarks of a similar character, Wollaston disavows in his final chapter the idea of the transmutation of species, though at the same time he can only say that the limitation of a species must be indicated somewhere. This timidity, which fits so well Coleridge's observations of the scientific mind, savors more of religious discomfort than genuine scientific conviction. It characterizes a considerable amount of the biological literature of the earlier half of the nineteenth century.
In the end it was an outsider, Robert Chambers, without professional ties, an amateur, as again Coleridge was sharp enough to generalize upon, who would break through the orthodox barrier of conservatism. Finally, it would be another wealthy amateur, Charles Darwin, whose massive treatise would swing world thought into a new channel. The story is a fascinating one. Coleridge's critical observations upon science made forty years before the publication of the Origin are an almost exact preview of what happened in the long history of the evolutionary concept.
The period prior to Darwin's enunciation of the full evolutionary doctrine is difficult to define with precision. Just as in the orchestra pit before a great musical performance there is the individual tuning of strings, plucking of stray notes, and discordant thumpings before the conductor, with his baton, brings unity into a composition, so in the period prior to 1859, we can get all manner of tentative retreats and approaches, partial developments, hesitant insights and bold sounds from the wings. When, at last, Darwin picks up the conductor's wand and turns this assemblage of stray notes into a full-throated performance, the world audience is swept off its feet so completely that, hypnotized by Darwin's single figure, it forgets the individual musicians who made his feat possible.
In actuality, life was not made natural in a day, nor in a single generation. Neither, we have observed, were geology and death. Before entering upon the difficult problem of life, therefore, let us now attempt to recall the major shifts which had taken place in scientific thinking upon this subject. It will be remembered that the seventeenth, and to a very considerable extent the eighteenth, century believed in a linked, unbreakable chain of organisms ascending in complexity to man. In spite of the fact that this conception bears a superficial resemblance to the idea of evolution, it is, in reality, a fixed, static, and immovable chain. Nothing changes position, nothing alters, nothing becomes extinct. By degrees, as the rock strata were found to contain organisms unlike those of the present era, two new conceptions arose. One of these came to be called progressionism and is associated with the catastrophic geology which we have previously examined.
This theory assumes that life was first manifested on the planet by simple organisms, but that from the very beginning of time, the stage was being set for man. Each ascending fauna, as we have seen, was successively swept away at the close of a catastrophic geological episode. For reasons unknown to man, but nevertheless mysteriously prophesied in the rocks, this lengthy prologue had preceded the human emergence. Each fauna, however, in spite of its anatomical relationship to the previous order, represented a separate act of creation. A kind of ideal Platonic morphology had been substituted for the notion of a direct physical descent which links the creatures of one age and those of the next.
The second idea which, although originally regarded askance, particularly in England, was being whispered about toward the close of the eighteenth century was that of evolution itself -- actual physical descent with bodily alterations from one age to another. The cosmic evolutionism which had begun to enter the speculations of the astronomers had now attracted some inquiring minds among the biologists. These early approaches to the problem were, however, vitiated by a certain casualness and lack of evidence. The age of the world was still being underestimated, and the lack of evidence for any really marked extinction (the notion of evolution actually preceded full-blown progressionism) led to an underestimation of the possibilities contained in the idea. Lamarck, who wrote the most extended treatise upon the subject, never was very sure about the matter of extinction. He succeeded in largely evading the subject by assuming that the missing animals had evolved, without perishing, into other forms. In skirting the problem of extinction, he was a typical child of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that Lamarck, besides grasping the reality of the evolutionary process, observed that creatures fitted themselves to the environment they occupied, rather than being made for that specific environment. In this respect alone Lamarck was years ahead of his time, because until geological change has been wedded to organic change, one cannot have a full-fledged evolutionary theory.
It has occasionally been said that Lamarck remained unappreciated because he entertained some ideas which sound ridiculous to the modern ear. Historical hindsight in such matters is rarely unprejudiced. One might as well argue that Newton should have passed unheeded because he wrote lengthily upon theology, or because he manifested paranoid mental tendencies in his declining years. If we were to ignore certain of our scientific forerunners upon such a basis, we would have to dismiss the discoveries of many geniuses of the scientific twilight who entertained advanced notions along with a sincere belief in witches. In time, scientific historians looking back will undoubtedly see our beliefs as shot through and through with the equivalent fantasies of our own age. It is not just to dismiss Lamarck on such a basis, for if we were to catalogue each change in thought that led on to Darwin, we would have to recognize that this much maligned French thinker glimpsed ecological change and adjustment before Darwin. In the process he recognized what Darwin was later to call the "law of divergence" and what the modern world calls "adaptive radiation."
At this moment of recognition, just as Halley had unwittingly set the solar system adrift without a pilot, so Lamarck, though he did not realize it, had destroyed the preordained character of the human emergence. Beside such a momentous observation, the question of whether his evolutionary mechanism was right or wrong lapses into comparative unimportance. The fact that generations of historians have seen this man purely as an advocate of a now rejected explanation of how evolution comes about is the result of two misfortunes: the fact that he was a Frenchman who survived the Revolution, and the additional misfortune that his successor, Charles Darwin, had little interest in, or concern with, the history of the subject. Darwin also cherished the common conservative English attitude toward the thinkers of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Something of a conspiracy of silence surrounded Lamarck's name and English naturalists disavowed his theories with almost ritualistic fervor.
Our first step in the effort to understand how life became natural, therefore, is to avoid the commonly held impression that Darwin, by a solitary innovation -- natural selection -- transformed the western world view. Without detracting in the least from his importance, we may observe that few, if any, scientific discoveries are made in such a fashion. Newton once made the perceptive observation that if he saw far, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Similarly, Charles Darwin was the inheritor of the efforts of his forerunners, but because of a new twist which he gave to those same efforts, the stages in the process leading to Darwin's achievement have passed largely unobserved. The drama of the voyage of the Beagle, the isolation of the years at Downe, the great shift in public opinion which began with the final acceptance of geological time through the studies of Lyell -- all, in a sense, have obscured rather than illuminated the Darwinian story.
Darwin has been left in solitary grandeur as a kind of psychological father figure to biologists. Let me repeat at this point, since I have already experienced the amount of emotional heat which can still be generated about this man, that I am interested only in the presentation of a succession of some easily verifiable ideas and a view of how they changed in order to bring us to the world we inhabit today. Darwin, some biologists have proclaimed, had nothing to do with his forerunners. Others, similarly aroused, have persisted in the reverse argument that Darwin had certainly made use of the ideas of his forerunners, but that this did not matter in the least because Darwin was the man who brought the public to a recognition of evolution.
Both of these remarks strike one as emotionally oriented. They serve to conceal a certain type of unsophisticated hero worship which still exists among occasional scientists unfamiliar with the history of ideas. What we are interested in at this point is solely how an idea, natural selection, beginning as a conservative eighteenth-century observation, was altered by slow degrees into something which set the world of life adrift in an unfixed wilderness as surely as Halley's sensitivity had set the star streams pouring through unimaginable darkness and distance.
Part II
Four propositions, it can now be observed, had to be clarified before the theory of organic evolution would prove acceptable to science. First, as we have already noted, the great antiquity of the planet had to be grasped. Otherwise life would occupy too narrow a segment of time for change of a slow nature to be possible. In fact, prior to the time of Linnaeus, abrupt spectacular mutations were occasionally discussed in agricultural works, -- although without reference to evolutionary ideas. The notion that species were completely immutable seems to have come in with a hardening of the religious temper, particularly in the century between about 1750 and 1859.
Second, it was necessary to establish the fact that there had been a true geological succession of forms on the planet. Though again, as we have already observed, this did not lead immediately to the acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis, it did call attention to a totally forgotten series of worlds stretching into the remote past. Inevitably any rational philosophy would have to account for the inhabitants of former times and, if possible, relate them to the plants and animals of the present. Knowledge of the vertebrate succession began to emerge only after 1800. As a consequence of this gap in our knowledge, paleontology for a time contributed to the growth of the progressionist scheme of mass extinctions and re-creations of life.
Third, the amount of individual variation in the living world and its possible significance in the creation of change had to be understood. Variation began to be noted and speculated about as far back as the seventeenth century, but its role in evolution would not be understood until much later. Nevertheless, the activities of stock breeders would engender some notion of at least limited organic change.
Fourth, the notion of the perpetually balanced world machine, which had been extended to life itself, had to give way to a conception of the organic world as not being in equilibrium at all -- or at least being only relatively so -- a world whose creations made and transformed themselves throughout eternity. Life had to be seen, in the apt phrase of a later evolutionist, Alfred Russel Wallace, as subject to "indefinite departure" -- alteration, in other words, subject to no return.
We have already had occasion to examine what occurred to illuminate the understanding of time and animal succession. It is with the last two of these four propositions, variation and the balanced world machine, that we will now concern ourselves. Before life could be viewed as in any way natural -- and it is not my intention to push this word too far -- a rational explanation of change through the ages had to be proposed. In a sense, it was Hutton and Lyell's problem of earth change reapplied to the problems of life. It embodied a similar search for natural causes at work in the present day -- causes still capable of study and observation. Variation, selection, the struggle for existence, were all known before Darwin. They were seen, however, within the context of a different world view. Their true significance remained obscured or muted in precisely the manner that Coleridge had anticipated in his estimate of the scientific mind.
It was not really new facts that were needed so much as a new way of looking at the world from an old set of data. A few men had tried to accomplish the task even before the close of the eighteenth century. The lack of knowledge of the fossil past, however, made their attempts impoverished and undramatic compared with the catastrophism which relegated their efforts to obscurity. They had failed to supply a satisfactory explanation for evolutionary change. In addition, England was swept by an anti-French wave of conservatism which was the intellectual product first of the Revolution, and then of the following Napoleonic wars. Her science, to a degree, became isolated from that of the Continent.
Part III
The historian who examines with care the documents of the eighteenth century before the recognition of extinction, and while the scale of nature is still the overriding biological as well as theological concept, will come immediately upon a principle of balance which was believed to prevail throughout the living world. This is what I meant when I said that the eighteenth-century love of order had been extended to the living world. Something of the complexity of the living environment had been observed, something of what the biologist of today would call food chains. To the eighteenth-century mind, however, this world was in a permanent, rather than dynamic, balance. It was a manifestation, in other words, of divine rule and government. Let me explain this subtlety, if I can. To do so, let us examine the work of just one man, John Bruckner, a Frenchman. Bruckner is the actual forerunner of Thomas Malthus, the man who so profoundly influenced the political and biological thinking of the nineteenth century.
Bruckner's book entitled A Philosophical Survey of the Animal Creation appeared in English in 1768, over thirty years before Malthus' Essay on the Human Population. In it he observes, "Providence seems to have advanced to the utmost verge of possibility in the gift of life conferred upon animated beings." Famine, pestilence and war, the checks upon human population to which Malthus devoted so much attention, occur in Bruckner's pages. The struggle for existence is very clear to him: "For it is with the animal as with the vegetable system: the different species can only subsist in proportion to the extent of land they occupy; and wherever the number of individuals exceeds this proportion, they must decline and perish."
Bruckner, however, is still obsessed with the short Christian time scale. "It is five thousand years at least," he observes, "that one part of the living substance had waged continual war with the other, yet we do not find that this Law of Nature [i.e., natural selection] has to this day occasioned the extinction of any one species." Here Bruckner is quite obviously laboring under the providential belief that extinction is an impossibility. In the next sentence Bruckner makes very clear the eighteenth century's recognition of the role of natural selection. "Nay," he says, continuing his discussion of the war of species against species, "it is this which has preserved them in that state of perpetual youth and vigor in which we behold them ...
"The effects of the carnivorous race," he goes on to add, "are exactly the same as that of the pruning-hook, with respect to shrubs which are too luxuriant in their growth, or of the hoe to plants that grow too close together. By the diminution of their number, the others arrive at greater perfection." Bruckner calls this process "reciprocal attrition." It will take other names before it finally reaches Darwin. Innumerable times it will be referred to by scientific writers as "pruning," "policing," "natural government."
The phrase "natural government" best expresses the eighteenth-century world view of the interlinked web of life. Like Hutton's world machine, its momentary aberrations were self-correcting. Hutton himself, in an unpublished work only recently made available, reveals a clear knowledge of natural selection in this varietally selective sense -- proving once more, if proof were needed, that the principle antedates Darwin. Struggle, it was thought, adjusted the quantity of life and eliminated the unfit. Beyond this, selection did not create. Life was held in a static balance. It was not going anywhere.
One other curious phrase in Bruckner's work demands attention, for it, too, is indicative of the time. "If the absolute number of inhabitants is not so great as it might have been, it is nevertheless always approaching toward its plenitude." The word "plenitude" had a very special meaning to the men of this age. It was assumed that God was creative up to the limit of his capacity, that every Platonic form or idea must be expressed in a rational universe. Thus the philosophic notion of plenitude contributed abstractly to what Professor Lovejoy has called a "Malthusian picture of a Nature overcrowded with aspirants for life."
The discovery of extinction did not, at first, disturb the idea of natural selection as a kind of beneficent provision of divine government. It merely operated in the old fashion within each episode of the advancing world of life. Buckland, in 1829, for example, speaks of "the carnivora in each period of the world's history fulfilling their destined office -- to check excess in the progress of life and maintain the balance of creation." Portlock, a geologist, referred to the idea as late as 1857 as a "sublime conclusion." The conception of a self-regulating balance of nature had survived the discovery of extinction and been taken up in the new progressionism without undergoing the slightest modification. Selection was still a conservative, not a creative, force in nature. Nevertheless, the age of the world had been lengthened and the concept of the struggle for existence was about to enter a new phase.
When Sir Charles Lyell broke through the strata which separated one age from another and proved that all the separate worlds of the catastrophists were, in reality, one single related and ever altering world, extinction, death, as we have previously seen, became natural. It was no longer veiled behind the mists of smoking volcanoes or hidden in the onrush of tidal waves. Species, it became apparent, died as men died, singly and sporadically. Lyell, like Bruckner, continued to see natural selection as a conservative force. He was faced, however, with an increasing handicap. If there was, in actuality, only one ever altering world, then the balance, the self-regulating government of living things, might not exist. If death approached living things in this piecemeal fashion, everything in time might perish.
The only solution lay in the acceptance of the ideas of the rejected evolutionists or in some form of mysterious point-creation to replace the sporadic disappearance of species. Though Lyell wrote much upon the struggle for existence, in the end he remained content with its negative aspects. He saw the web of life as drawn so tightly that there would be no room for a new form to emerge or evolve. Before it could do so, he believed, it would be overwhelmed by the perfectly adjusted organisms about it. At the same time, Lyell was not insensible to a certain degree of variability within the limits of a species. It was his opinion that this ability to develop minor geographic varieties aided the survival of wide-ranging species. In the main, however, Lyell insisted upon his principle of preoccupancy -- that is, the idea that plants and animals long adapted to a specific environment will be able to keep foreign intruders from occupying a new country.
Basically this was once more a static conception. At the time it was made, Darwin was observing the influx of foreign weeds in the pampas, the havoc wrought by the introduction of the fauna of the continents upon oceanic islands. But Darwin was still a young naturalist enjoying his first experience of the world. Back home in England, the century was pressing on.
In 1835 Edward Blyth, a young naturalist of Darwin's own age, wrote a paper on animal varieties. Hidden obscurely in the midst of the paper was Blyth's discussion of what he called his "localizing principle." Blyth, in fact, had described what today we call Darwinian natural selection. Blyth saw his principle as one "intended by Providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species." In this respect Blyth sounds like a pure eighteenth-century exponent of natural government, but by 1837 certain additional thoughts had begun to impress themselves upon the young man.
"A variety of important considerations here crowd upon the mind," Blyth confesses, "foremost of which is the enquiry that, as man, by removing species from their appropriate haunts, superinduces changes on their physical constitution and adaptations, to what extent may not the same take place in wild nature, so that, in a few generations, distinctive characters may be acquired, such as are recognized as indicative of specific diversity. May not then, a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common heritage?"
These words were written in 1837, a short time after Charles Darwin had returned from the Beagle voyage. We know that Darwin was an avid reader of the Magazine of Natural History, in which Blyth's papers appeared. We know further that there is interior evidence, in Darwin's two early essays before the Origin of Species was attempted, which points strongly to Darwin's early knowledge of Blyth's work. At least one of his letters speaks of his fascination with "some few naturalists" in the Magazine of Natural History, and there are other references in the undestroyed portions of his notebook recently published by Sir Gavin de Beer. Just as Coleridge had commented eighteen years before, however, scientific convention kept young Edward Blyth from quite accepting his own speculation. "There is a compact among the learned," Coleridge had said, "not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science."
Blyth had not made a world voyage like Darwin. He was overawed by his masters, including Lyell. He had rubbed his eyes and the safe and sane conventional world of the English hedgerows had seemed for an instant to alter into something demonic. In the next moment the vision was gone.
Scientific convention has held for a hundred years that the author of the Origin read Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1838 and received from that work the hint which led to his discovery of natural selection. While Malthus undoubtedly had a wide influence during this period and is a convenient source of reference, it is now unlikely that he was Darwin's main source of inspiration. Darwin opened his first notebook on the species question in 1837, the year young Blyth ventured beyond the unconscious convention of his time. Locked away in Darwin's early essays are some curious similarities of thought which strain credulity to be called coincidence.
John Bruckner preceded and was used by Thomas Malthus. Edward Blyth preceded and was used by Charles Darwin. There is one difference. Malthus added almost nothing to the thought of Bruckner. Darwin, by contrast, took the immature thought, the nudge from Blyth, and combined it with his own vast and growing experience. He refused to see environments as fixed, and organisms as fixed with them. He argued cogently that no environment is completely static, and that selection therefore is constantly at work in the production of new organisms as time and slowly changing geological conditions alter the existing world. An idea which began as an explanation of "natural government," a stabilizing factor making for providential control of the living world, had changed by slow degrees, even as men openly contradicted what their own eyes professed to see.
The individual variation which all organisms revealed, the hereditary alterations produced by the breeder's art, the unreturning fossils in the rocks, were finally combined in the minds of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace with the world of competitive struggle, with that concept of plenitude which was now seen to eternally jostle the living in and out of existence.
It was not natural selection that was born in 1859, as the world believes. Instead it was natural selection without balance. Bruckner's "impetuous torrent," which he visualized as beating against its safe restraining dikes, is loose and rolling. The violence in Hutton's raindrop is equaled, if not surpassed, by the violence contained in a microscopic genetic particle. The one, multiplied, carries away a mountain range. The other crosses an ice age and produces, on its far side, a man-ape whose intellectual powers now endanger his own civilization.
The world of geological prophecy has vanished. There is only this vast uneasy river of life spreading into every possible niche, dreaming its way toward every possible form. Since the beginning there have been no breaks in that river. The immaterial blueprints were an illusion generated by physical descent. The lime in our bones, the salt in our blood were not from the direct hand of the Craftsman. They were, instead, part of our heritage from an ancient and forgotten sea.
Yet for all this flood of change, movement and destruction, there is an enormous stability about the morphological plans which are built into the great phyla -- the major divisions of life. They have all, or most of them, survived since the first fossil records. They do not vanish. The species alter, one might say, but the Form, that greater animal which stretches across the millennia, survives. There is a curious comfort in the discovery. In some parts of the world, if one were to go out into the woods, one would find many versions of oneself, with fur and grimaces, surveying one's activities from behind leaves and thickets. It is almost as though somewhere outside, somewhere beyond the illusions, the several might be one.
Part IV
MANY years ago I was once, by accident, locked in a museum with which I had some association. In the evening twilight I found myself in a lengthy hall containing nothing but Crustacea of all varieties. I used to think they were a rather limited order of life, but as I walked about impatiently in my search for a guard, the sight began to impress, not to say overawe, me.
The last light of sunset, coming through a window, gilded with red a huge Japanese crab on a pedestal at one end of the room. It was one of the stilt-walkers of the nightmare deeps, with a body the size of a human head carried tiptoe on three-foot legs like fire tongs. In the cases beside him there were crabs built and riveted like Sherman tanks, and there were crabs whose claws had been flattened into plates that clapped over their faces and left them shut up inside with little secrets. There were crabs covered with chitinous thorns that would have made them indigestible; there were crabs drawn out and thin, with delicate elongated pinchers like the tools men use to manipulate at a distance in dangerous atomic furnaces.
There were crabs that planted sea growths on their backs and marched about like restless gardens. There were crabs as ragged as waterweed or as smooth as beach pebbles; there were crabs that climbed trees and crabs from beneath the polar ice. But the sea change was on them all. They were one, one great plan that flamed there on its pedestal in the sinister evening light, but they were also many and the touch of Maya, of illusion, lay upon them.
I was shivering a little by the time the guard came to me. Around us in the museum cases was an old pattern, out of the remote sea depths. It was alien to man. I would never underestimate it again. It is not the individual that matters; it is the Plan and the incredible potentialities within it. The forms within the Form are endless and their emergence into time is endless. I leaned there, gazing at that monster from whom the forms seemed flowing, like the last vertebrate on a world whose sun was dying. It was plain that they wanted the planet and meant to have it. One could feel the massed threat of them in this hall.
"It looks alive, Doctor," said the guard at my elbow.
"Davis," I said with relief, "you're a vertebrate. I never appreciated it before, but I do now. You're a vertebrate, and whatever else you are or will be, you'll never be like that thing in there. Never in ten million years. I believe I'm right in congratulating you. Just remember that we're both vertebrates and we've got to stick together. Keep an eye on them now -- all of them. I'll spell you in the morning."
Davis did something then that restored my confidence in man. He laughed, and touched my shoulder lightly. I have never heard a crab laugh and I never expect to hear one. It is not in the pattern of the arthropods.
Yet those crabs taught me a lesson really. They reminded me that an order of life is like a diamond of many reflecting surfaces, each with its own pin-point of light contributing to the total effect. It is a troubling thought, contend some, to be a man and a God-created creature, and at the same time to see animals which mimic our faces in the forest. It is not a good thing to take the center of the stage and to feel at one's back the amused little eyes from the bush. It is not a good thing, someone maintained to me only recently, that animals should stand so close to man.
It depends, I suppose, on the point of view.
On my office wall is a beautiful photograph of a slow loris with round, enormous eyes set in the spectral face of a night-haunter. From a great bundle of fur a small hand protrudes to clasp a branch. Only a specialist would see in that body the far-off simulacrum of our own. Sometimes when I am very tired I can think myself into the picture until I am wrapped securely in a warm coat with a fine black stripe down my spine. And my hands would still grasp a stick as they do today. At such times a great peace settles on me, and with the office door closed, I can sleep as lemurs sleep tonight, huddled high in the great trees of two continents. Let the storms blow through the streets of cities; the root is safe, the many-faced animal of which we are one flashing and evanescent facet will not pass with us. When the last seared hand has flung the last grenade, an older version of that hand will be stroking a clinging youngster hidden in its fur, high up under some autumn moon. I will think of beginning again, I say to myself then, sleepily. I will think of beginning again, in a different way ...