The Beginnings of Things

I have been reading, online, a book called Time and Change, by John Burroughs, the enormously gifted naturalist and writer. I am reading the book at Book Glutton, a marvelous site I discovered not long ago where you can upload and read public domain books in a special “reader” the site’s founders developed.

Time and Change, as you might guess, is about the evolutionary processes that formed the earth and all life upon earth. It’s not a scientific, academic book; it’s a book for the educated, curious layperson, written from a philosophical perspective and filled with a sense of wonder about the forces of natural selection that have guided life’s progression from the simplest forms of life on earth to the world as we know it today, within a time frame so vast that it’s truly beyond the human capacity even to imagine.

In an early section of the book, called “The Long Road,” Burroughs muses about the seamlessness of evolutionary change — how unbroken the progression is from one species to another. Where or when is the place at which one can say, “Here! Mankind begins at this point!” The answer is, we can’t. All we can see is a moment in time; we do not see the process:

When we have taken the first step in trying to solve the problem of man’s origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in his history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java,—Pithecanthropus erectus, described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost said “step on his tail,” for we undoubtedly, if we go back far enough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it also has a coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But could we stop with the tailed man—the manlike ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start him with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his own invention?

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man’s origin, and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can find the point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by the supernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miracle begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seas must have been natural, or it would not have occurred,—must have been potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far as we know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of cause and effect is continuous and inviolable.

We know that no man is born of full stature, with his hat and boots on; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infant grows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleated protoplasm in the mother’s womb. Why may not the race of man grow from a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it IS the order of nature,—first the germ, the inception, then the slow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of our own thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language.

Time and Change, by John Burroughs, complete book, here.