THE

NEW IRELAND REVIEW.

OCTOBER, 1898.

IT

A QUESTION OF GENEALOGIES.

T was not a story It told me that autumn night when the wind was howling round Gobelin Grange like a legion of ghostly hounds in full cry, it was rather a string of reminiscences of my earliest generations. If you have read Gobelin Grange you will know who It was, if you have not it is sufficient for the present purpose that It was an individuality of wide experience but doubtful derivation-an individuality that laid claim to antiquity, ubiquity and, I fear, iniquity, if Its recollections could only be accepted as veracious. But ghosts, being only men of a larger kind, are at times equally given to untruth, with this difference, that when they lie, their lies are built on huger lines.

The fact is, I had been fishing for a little information on the vexed problem of the beginnings of things when It suddenly flung the question in my face:

You don't remember, I suppose, the death of your earliest ancestor? No, it is not a slip of the tongue, no Hibernianism, since if you held by some of the many creeds now in vogue, and if they were true, your continuity of being might have carried you back.

You have forgotten if you knew? That is curious, for your experience of life must have shown you that the undesirable is what sticks to the memory, and of all things in Time the first death in the world must surely have the least pleasant associations, and, therefore, should be the best remembered. Perhaps I can recall the story, or by following up the sequence of existences strike upon a chord of recollection. Let me try.

Had a Coroner's inquest been held on its flaccid remains the verdict would probably have been-Death by misadventure; but how it came there at all there is no evidence to show; and the viewers of the dead would have been nearer the truth than is the custom of verdicts, whether of one man or a dozen. Nearer the truth, that is: when the case is VOL. X.-No. 2

considered broadly. It was what your Tennyson must have meant when he said

“ The individual withers, but the world is more and more.”

and, as a matter of hard fact : it was dead. As to the actual cause of death perhaps it was a lady Protozoon; who, tempted by curiosity, wandered too near some one or other of the earth's grinning mouths of eternal fire, and so suffered death by getting into too hot water, as many of its latest relatives do unto this day. Or it may be that approaching too near the new formed granite, seeking-like an earlier and entirely premature Alexander-new worlds to conquer, its existence was battered out against the rocks.

Dead, oh yes; but the tribe remained; and for the sake of continuity I am going to suppose an individual and prolonged existence, carried onward and upward, shrewdly developing with the increasing possibilities of each age ; and not a series of types.

One of your latter day writers, in whom it is hard to say whether the satirist or humorist predominates, has condensed the weather of his story into a final chapter. Honest plagiarism is to be commended, and I propose to borrow his idea with a variation. To avoid frequent interruptions I propose to at once set forth the basis of indisputable truth upon which the narrative is founded. No. I decline to argue whether "indisputable truth" is a pleonasm seeing that truth, being truth, must be indisputable. You know very well what I mean, and it has a fine sonorous sound, which goes a long way in an argument.

Here, then, are the foundations upon which all things are built.

We start with a deceased Protozoon, but a Protozoon with, as so many of us have, a huge circle of uninteresting relations, and endowed with well-defined characteristics. Assuming, then, that in this present day there exists a being thus surrounded and similarly endowed, are we not justified in at once proclaiming such a one to be the ascendant of our Protozoon? Clearly so, in spite of any objection which you may urge against such a use of the word ascendant,

Well, then, is the premiss true as regards the circle of social environment? I think we may accept this portion of the proposition, though, of course, you understand, there is nothing personal in the application. Granting, then, the relations, we pass to the endowments.

Now, what do we find to be the well-defined characteristics of our Protozoon? You can check them off on the fingers of one hand, thus :Curiosity,

Restlessness,

Acquisitiveness,

Discontent,

Stomach,

all, you will surely admit, eminently human.

Without the first, if one of our earlier theories be true-and it is a poor speculative science that has not at least two theories, either of which will serve on a pinch-without this curiosity, I say, our Protozoon had never boiled its jelly, but had remained a happy infusorium until it fell a victim, by inevitable course of nature, to indigestion.

As to the second, a microscope will tell you that to this day it can neither rest nor sleep. More, it flings itself into fifty contortions in as many minutes, for, apparently, the pure zest of the thing. A child in its unconscious abandonment to activity is no more responsible than our Protozoon.

The third and the fourth naturally go together. Mutually creative, they show themselves in our Protozoon in that ill-judged attempt upon the granite which, in our second and equally reliable theory, led to premature death. It was as unwise then as now to want the whole earth.

As for the fifth, our Protozoon is unsatiable in its appetite for stomachs. A single one utterly fails to satisfy, and there are times when even a hundred are insufficient to soothe its aspirations. Ah, my friend, you who sit there with one pair of hands folded over one waist coat, can know little of the placid contentment of a hundred good digestions. No nominal organs these, but honest, useful stomachs that can digest a dinner with more satisfaction than can that of an alderman.

Now, take these characteristics, and, like so many garments of the spirit, fit them on the development of these latter days, and though it may be in a changed form, your Protozoon walks the earth, sails the seas, breathes the air, shorn only of one glory; he is reduced to the enjoyment of a single stomach. In every other characteristic of the five he is identical, and while this reduction in number may appear a retrogression, it is only in appearance and not in fact, since whoso has failed to keep one in order will not regret the ninety-nine! The hundred stomachs may, perhaps, therefore, be taken as a luxuriant redundancy to be rigidly repressed by an advanced intelligence, rather than as a source of proper pride.

You admit my reasoning? The promptings of an imperfect digestion argue for my contention. The eagerness with which you peer into the incomprehensible; your very insomnia, your grumbles at snow in May and a temperature of 60° in December, your turtle soup, vintage clarets, and grouse hung by the legs until they drop, all plead the cause of science.

One more point and I have done with the irrefragable logic of facts and proceed to narrative. You will find breaks; yes, it is frankly admitted, you will find breaks. But breaks are to science what sentiment and imagination are to life. Breaks are the poetry of science. There, freed from the trammels of cast-iron fact, imagination has its play. By them the grey iteration of the million centuries is tinged with

glory.

There the jaded stringer of world-histories finds rest and refreshment. Come what will we cling to our breaks.

Now that you are convinced, we will return to our Protozoon, and in order to point the interest of the story we will endow him with an individuality and call him you. Nay, no apologies, no false modesty; you fit the case admirably, and I daresay a little effort will, as I have said.

recall the course of events.

Though an interesting, you were an exceedingly minute, personage. Placed in the most delicate of scales not even your five score of stomachs, fully padded, would have caused the tremor of a hairsbreadth. Not to offend your sensibility, I refrain from suggesting your entire absence of size, and yet, in your own way, you were as fine a fellow as you are now, sitting there in your armchair, with a cigar in the corner of

your mouth. Slowly, and by the assistance of say five millions of years of mineral baths at a comfortable temperature, you grew, by dint of persistent, but not too severe, friction against the granite of your coasts; you toughened that jelly of yours into a skin, and from skin to shell is but the step of so many hundred centuries. Thus, when the Cambrian schists and slates came to overlie the granite they found you, changed in name, indeed, but not in nature, since the Lingula was but the Protozoon with additions.

You do not recall that period-are not proud, perhaps, of your gropings in the Cambrian mud? You are not inclined to square your back to the fire, thrust your thumbs into the armholes of your waistcoat and say, "Hah! well enough for you young fellows to talk, but I was born with only a shell to my back—only a shell, sir; yet see me now, and all by dint of discontent!" No. It is curious, but I have noticed that some people are not proud of their origin, however obscure.

When I knew you later—was it five or ten million years which had passed? Really time slips through one's fingers so, and my memory is none of the best; but, however long the period which had elapsed, you were then a Trilobite. It must ever be a source of satisfaction to remember that the tail which at this period you had developed was more or less anchylosed, and that your eyes, though sessile, were already compound. Why you took so much pains to procure a tail which you were presently to take even more pains to get rid of, was a mystery to me. By the way, that was an odd habit you had of swimming on your back ; you never would explain why you preferred that position, and now, I daresay, you've forgotten.

Ah! these were happy days in that old Silurian slime. Do you remember the day you and that Graptolite had the famous tussle in the slate mud? I have often wondered what would have happened to the world's development if he had whipped and eaten you; for the race would then have ascended in another line of progression. Queer to think of, isn't it? Happy thing you ate him, or we might never have had a George Washington.

What was it drove you into the deeper waters? For it must have been about this time, or a little later, say another eight or ten million years, that I knew you as a Cephalaspis. How abominably conceited you were of that hideous helmet of yours! If you are still bitten by admiration of your then appearance, go and meditate on the Devonian Marls; study their revelations and be ashamed. Remember Sixtus the Fifth and his swineherd's staff, and whenever the lust of the eyes and the pride of life shine back upon you from your glass, think of the Cephalaspis and be humble. Yet nothing in nature is without effect. That passion of yours for inappropriate headgear stamped your race to these latest generations. Curious, though, that it should chiefly display itself now-a-days in the female line of ascent.

You were having a very hard time of it when we next met. Do you remember the circumstances? Your ambition was leading you landward. Warm seas, as plentifully stocked as a rabbit-warren, were insufficient to satisfy your desires. You were as insatiable as an Irish beggar. Was there ever a truer type of the Protozoon, or a more triumphant proof of the power of heredity, than is found in the same beggar? Let science, seeking a recrudescence of incapacity, restlessness, discontent, and acquisitiveness, look there for the justification of the theory of development, and rest satisfied with the clear evidence which abounds from Malin Head to Cape Clear. At that time all these, with the exception of the incapacity, were working in you, and you hungered after the empire of the soil. Then, as now, you never could let well alone. Nothing would satisfy you but you must needs be an Archegosaurus ; and finely you suffered for it.

How the Carbonic Acid, shaken out of the Lycopodia, Lepidodendra, and Sigillaria of those coming Coal Measures, choked you! If you won your dominion it was like your modern Intermediate System at the heavy cost of a stunted development; and I remember, as if it were yesterday, how bitterly you complained of your inability to enjoy the magnificence of the forest scenery. How you coughed and spluttered, gasping after oxygen and finding precious little.

I have always believed that your ill-advised pigheadedness during part of these few million years, was the real cause of that sad relapse of yours into a Labyrinthodon. And what did you gain? Three toes, and, doubtless, liberty to roam through growths stupendous; growths worthy of a Brobdingnag; but growths without even the suggestion of a flower to enliven them, and veiled from pole to pole in shadowy monotony.

No matter in what other of your ancestors you find food for proper pride, I hardly think any self-respecting Protozoon, from Granite to Pleistocene, would care to hang your Labyrinthodon portrait above his mantelpiece. A toad of ox-like proportions may be unique as a family connection, but if I were you I would decently bury the relationship in