A Cityless and Countryless World
An Outline of Practical Co-Operative Individualism
Henry Olerich
[A condensed and edited version of the book
originally published by Gilmore & Olerich, Holstein, Iowa, 1893 /
CHAPTER 3 - The Marsian Theory of Creation and Formation]
…I am endeavoring to give you an explanation of the foundation
upon which all knowledge must be built. …All growth and change
that has ever taken place in the universe is based on this question,
the question of growth and development.
"Respecting the origin of man and the formation of the universe,
two theories or doctrines were long current… One, the scientific
doctrine of evolution, which is founded on the principle of growth and
change, governed by fixed laws. The other, the theological doctrine of
special creation which is founded on revelation. The doctrine of
evolution assumes that the universe has slowly, through the lapse of
millions of ages, been evolved from previously existing matter by
continuous integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of
motion, and that man gradually and slowly evolved from lower
organisms, and has attained his present form and mental endowments by
the influence of his environment, personal and ancestral. It teaches
that man, as a whole, has been, and is still continually rising in the
scale of existence. It is, there fore, also an encouraging and
cheerful belief.
The long antiquated doctrine of special creation assumed that the
universe was created out of nothing by an external agency; that man
was created perfect out of clay, somewhat after the fashion that a
potter makes an earthern vessel, and that he fell from his state of
perfection to what we now find him. This was a discouraging, a gloomy
belief, which, if continued, must eventually end in total degradation.
A good farmer always reserves the best of his crops for seed. This is
artificial selection; that is, the best and fittest is artificially
reserved by man for seed, which is to produce the next year s crop. A
stock breeder reserves the largest, strongest, fleetest and most
symmetrical individuals to propagate the race.
The horticulturist selects seed from the choicest flowers and fruit.
You see all this is selection, but not natural selection; it is
artificial, as you call it, because it is done by man. Man aids
nature, so to speak; but nature unaided makes just such selection
during the lapse of long ages. In the plant and animal kingdoms,
especially in the lower orders millions must perish in order to give
room and opportunity for a few to live. As long as muscle, and not
reason, is the most advantageous weapon in the struggle for existence,
the strongest, toughest, fleetest and fiercest ones survive and
reproduce the race, and in this manner the superior qualities of the
parents are continually transmitted and added to, in the offspring.
Organs develop by healthful use and become rudimentary by disuse. The
blacksmith's arm becomes strong by constant healthful use. The eyes of
moles became rudimentary by disuse. The crabs and fishes in the
Mammoth Cave have lost their eyes entirely by disuse, but the sockets
remain as rudimentary remnants. If we should keep the right arm
constantly out of use, and do all our work with the left, that is,
beginning at childhood, there would be a perceptible difference in the
size and function of the two arms in one generation; and, if this
practice were continued for thousands of generations, use, disuse and
heredity would no doubt aid in bringing about a vast inequality
between the active and inactive arms.
There are vast transformations taking place before our own eyes …
which are wonderful proofs of evolution. For instance, the frog begins
life as a fish and then lungs displace gills. Butterflies, bees and
beetles of all kinds start out as grubs and undergo wonderful
transformations.
Embryonic (pertaining to the rudiments of an undeveloped plant or
animal) growth furnishes one of the strongest, as well as the most
startling proofs of evolution. Each individual passes through all the
successive stages which have preceded in the line of its tribal
history.
In morphological structure, convincing proofs of evolution are found.
We find fossil remains of animals that have gradually developed in
size from a fox to your modern horse.
"Geologists have partially examined the [Earth's] crust to a
certain depth. … Fossils (animal and vegetable remains imbedded
in the rock formation of the earth s crust) of various kinds are found
in this rock formation composing the crust. Remains of the most lowly
organized plants and animals are found in the lowest strata, and as we
ascend the fossils become more and more complex. And the present
generation of organic beings living on the surface … of the
earth, are more complex and more highly developed than any fossil
remains that have ever been buried on the respective planets.
The preceding consideration shows that the fossils testify to the
fact that there has been a slow, but gradual development during the
almost immeasurable eons of time that were required for the formation
of these sedimentary strata that contain the precious Revolution
written by the finger of Time on the Rock of Ages, and by the ink of
Death.
The crust is growing thicker every moment by internal cooling and by
external accretion of meteoric dust, etc., and fossils of the present
time are now being buried the same as they were during all preceding
geologic ages.
Let us, in a few thoughts, endeavor to travel back from the present
to that primitive time, when nature imbedded the first organic remains
in the then forming strata. The proportion of water area to the land
was much greater then than it is at present. There were no high
mountains, because the solid crust was thin, and the doubling or
folding up of a thin crust can not produce a high fold, or mountain,
and, therefore, the [Earth's] crust, or surface, was at this primitive
beginning not so much diversified by mountains and depressions as it
is at present. It was more nearly spherical, and hence all, or nearly
all, covered with water.
Igneous rocks, as you know, are produced by the gradual cooling of
the heated matter of a planet, moon, or sun. They are formed next to
the internal fire, and can, therefore, contain no fossils. Before
fossils could be imbedded, igneous rocks had to be slowly
disintegrated by the action of heat and cold, wind and wave, rain and
drought, and other atmospheric phenomena. Clay, soil, sand, etc., is
nothing but a pulverized igneous rock.
After the solid igneous rock gradually became pulverized, the wind,
rain, tide, flood and current had to carry this pulverized igneous
rock, or sand, into the lowest ocean and river beds, where the process
of forming sedimentary (deposited by water), fossiliferous, stratified
rock began.
Here we can clearly see, then, how the remains of perished plants and
animals have been imbedded from time to time in this slowly forming
sedimentary rock. The fossils of the lower strata are the simplest;
those nearest the surface, or the most recently formed, the most
complex. The modern wrecked steamer will be a fossil of the future,
the same as the entombed skeleton of antiquity, or the imbedded canoe
of primitive man, are fossils of the present. The fossils, then, are
one of the strongest proofs of evolution. They indicate a slow but
gradual development of plant and animal life; and as time passes, both
here and on Mars, more and more new links, which bind all things into
a grand whole, imperceptible gradations of development, are being
discovered.
Such, then, are some of the most conspicuous signs which undoubtedly
suggested and strengthened, at every step of advance, the evolution
theory; and also correspondingly weakened and discredited the special
creation theory.
I have so far considered evolution only as affecting the … earth
s crusts, and the organic beings living upon them. I endeavored to
make the elucidation as clear as possible by beginning at the nearest,
simplest and most conspicuous evidences. But let us bear in mind that
our earth [is] Only [a] little nook, insignificant … as compared
with the visible universe. We are convinced now that evolution holds
good in the formation and dissolution of heavenly bodies as well as in
the formation of planets crusts, and in the development of organic
beings. The planets with their attendant moons are little solar
systems, so to speak, with their moons revolving around them, which
were detached from the planets millions of ages ago. Saturn has eight
moons and an unbroken ring. The sun has planets revolving around him,
the same as the moons revolve around the planets, and our whole solar
system revolves around a center with incredible velocity. From moon to
planet, from planet to sun, from sun to Galaxy we may travel in our
imagination and rest on the ultimate axiom the persistence of force.
We have no reason to believe that there is a gap or break anywhere in
the operation of the so-called nature. No one can tell precisely where
the human leaves off and the animal begins; where the animal leaves
off and the vegetable begins; where the organic leaves off and the
inorganic begins. There is a gradual development from the simple to
the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the
superior, from the ignorant to the intelligent, from the cruel to the
gentle; a gradual merging or gradation from one into the other; the
transition at any one point is so slight that it is imperceptible to
the human eye. Allow me to say that there never was a first human
being, no more than there was a first threshing machine. The mouth of
the animal was a very primitive threshing machine; then the mouth and
paws together; then the hand; then the flail, then the hand-thresher;
then the horse-power, and now the steam-thresher; thus we see that
there never was a first thresher, nor was it ever made, but gradually
developed and improved to its present structure and capacity; so, too,
with man. The lower organism out of which man, through the lapse of
countless ages, evolved, gradually grew more and more human like from
the effects of intercourse with his environment; and this process is
still going on. Man is not finished yet. The same forces that have
brought him from his primitively low plane to his present relatively
high one are elevating him still higher. So we see that man was not
created, but is still being created, evolved; and so with all else.
According to what you call the nebular hypothesis, the earth once
filled the entire orbit of the moon. The matter composing the earth
was then in a rare, highly- heated state, revolving around the sun,
from which it was detached and rotated on its axis, which caused the
detachment of the matter out of which the moon was formed.
The number of atoms composing the earth, as well as the number of
atoms composing the entire solar system, was practically the same then
as it is now. Heat, which is the repellent force, kept the atoms and
molecules so far apart that the matter composing the earth formed a
sphere of nebulous matter, filling the entire orbit of the moon. In
like manner did the sun once fill the entire orbit of the earth, and
at a preceding time the entire orbit of Neptune.
"But some time before this, the earth was even larger than the
orbit of the moon. The nebulous matter now composing the earth and the
moon, which are now two separate bodies, was once all in the same
sphere. By the gradual radiation of heat, the volume, but not the
mass, diminished, and the axial rotation increased until a broad
concentric ring detached itself. The impulse of the moon s
revolutionary motion was given by the earth s rotation on its axis.
All plastic bodies, like a planet, etc., assume a spherical form,
because all particles equally distant from the center are equally
attracted toward the center; and a sphere is the only solid in which
these conditions can be fulfilled. A sphere formed from the breaking
up and concentrating of a broad concentric ring, like the rings out of
which planets and moons are formed, must necessarily rotate on its
axis, because the particles which compose the concentric ring had an
unequal revolutionary velocity. Those particles of the ring nearest
the center had a less angular velocity than those particles farthest
away from the center.
Just as these few bodies constituting our solar system of which I
have spoken were and are affected, so, we believe, have been or will
all heavenly bodies moons, planets, suns and stars in all parts of the
universe be affected during the lapse of untold ages.
CONTENTS
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