The Faber Book of Science (15 page)

But Gosse then faced a second and larger difficulty: the prochronic argument may work for organisms and their life cycles, but how can it be applied to the entire earth and its fossil record – for Gosse intended
Omphalos
as a treatise to reconcile the earth with biblical chronology, ‘an attempt to untie the geological knot.' His statements about prochronic parts in organisms are only meant as collateral support for the primary geological argument. And Gosse's geological claim fails precisely because it rests upon such dubious analogy with what he recognized (since he gave it so much more space) as a much stronger argument about modern organisms.

Gosse tried valiantly to advance for the entire earth the same two premises that made his prochronic argument work for organisms. But an unwilling world rebelled against such forced reasoning and
Omphalos
collapsed under its own weight of illogic. Gosse first tried to argue that all geological processes, like organic life cycles, move in circles:

But Gosse could never document any inevitable geological cyclicity, and his argument drowned in a sea of rhetoric and biblical allusion from Ecclesiastes: ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea
is
not full.
Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.'

Secondly, to make fossils prochronic, Gosse had to establish an analogy so riddled with holes that it would make the most ardent mental tester shudder – embryo is to adult as fossil is to modern organism. One might admit that chickens require previous eggs, but why should a modern reptile (especially for an antievolutionist like Gosse) be necessarily linked to a previous dinosaur as part of a cosmic cycle? A python surely does not imply the ineluctable entombment of an illusory
Triceratops
into prochronic strata.

With this epitome of Gosse's argument, we can resolve the paradox posed at the outset. Gosse could accept strata and fossils as illusory and still advocate their study because he did not regard the prochronic part of a cycle as any less ‘true' or informative than its conventional diachronic segment. God decreed two kinds of existence – one constructed all at once with the appearance of elapsed time, the other progressing sequentially. Both dovetail harmoniously to form
uninterrupted
circles that, in their order and majesty, give us insight into God's thoughts and plans.

The prochronic part is neither a joke nor a test of faith; it represents God's obedience to his own logic, given his decision to order creation in circles. As thoughts in God's mind, solidified in stone by creation
ab
nihilo,
strata and fossils are just as true as if they recorded the products of conventional time. A geologist should study them with as much care and zeal, for we learn God's ways from both his prochronic and his diachronic objects. The geological time scale is no more meaningful as a yardstick than as a map of God's thoughts.

Thus, Gosse offered
Omphalos
to practicing scientists as a helpful resolution of potential religious conflicts, not a challenge to their procedures or the relevance of their information.

His son Edmund wrote of the great hopes that Gosse held for
Omphalos:

Yet readers greeted
Omphalos
with disbelief, ridicule, or worse, stunned silence. Edmund Gosse continued:

Although Gosse reconciled himself to a God who would create such a minutely detailed, illusory past, this notion was anathema to most of his countrymen. The British are a practical, empirical people, ‘a nation of shopkeepers' in Adam Smith's famous phrase; they tend to respect the facts of nature at face value and rarely favor the complex systems of nonobvious interpretation so popular in much of continental thought. Prochronism was simply too much to swallow. The Reverend Charles Kingsley, an intellectual leader of unquestionable devotion to both God and science, spoke for a consensus in stating that he could not ‘give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie.'

And so it has gone for the argument of
Omphalos
ever since. Gosse did not invent it, and a few creationists ever since have revived it from time to time. But it has never been welcome or popular because it violates our intuitive notion of divine benevolence as free of devious behavior – for while Gosse saw divine brilliance in the idea of prochronism, most people cannot shuck their seat-of-the-pants feeling that it smacks of plain old unfairness. Our modern American creationists reject it vehemently as imputing a dubious moral character to God and opt instead for the even more ridiculous notion that our
miles of fossiliferous strata are all products of Noah's flood and can therefore be telescoped into the literal time scale of Genesis.

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:

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.

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 submarine 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.