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Back of All Nature There Lies a Power: “Under the Open Sky” by S. C. Schmucker, 1910

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Sep 292020

So all nature awaits the return of Spring,. Whether it be the crow in his flock, the wasp in her sheltered cranny, the muskrat in its cave by the water, the rich thick sap in the root of the tree, or the stored up life in the bulb, they all await the one far-off divine event. For back of all Nature there lies a Power that has been and is and is to be. What, after all, do we mean by Nature but the sum total of all these manifestations of purpose, of foresight, of helpfulness, of striving for higher and ever higher levels?Why does evolution mean life more abounding , and degeneration mean atrophy and death, if there be not, pervading the universe, a power, a principle, a stimulus, a goal?
And shall we, as did the Hebrew tribes of old, falter to speak the ineffable name? Shall we not rather worship Him humbly as we see His power, thank Him gratefully that we have been permitted to think His thoughts after Him, look up to Him confidently for that we have come to see how He has infused us with Himself, and lovingly call him Father and God?

SO SOON AFTER MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLES OF CHARLES MONTGOMERY SKINNER, IT WAS A BIT OF A SHOCK TO MEET HIS NEAR-POLAR OPPOSITE, SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SKINNER. This chemist, evolutionary biologist, Nature Study advocate, and theologian was Christian in more than middle name. Indeed, arriving at the passage above on the final pages of “Under the Open Sky”, the reader is tempted to conclude that, for Schmucker, getting close to Nature was primarily a vehicle for having a religious experience. While it is tempting to write him off as a Bible-thumper, in fact, Schmucker occupied an odd corner of the Biblical creationism / biological evolutionism controversy of the time. Viewing God as immanent in Nature, Schmucker was quite comfortable with speculating about the evolution of the hummingbird on one page, and then making a reference to the Hebrew Bible on the next one.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, HIS RELIGIOUS ZEAL LEFT HIM PRONE TO AN OVERLY ROSY OUTLOOK ON HUMAN PROGRESS AND ITS IMPACTS ON NATURE. In one early passage in this book (which explores nature from the conventional seasonal perspective so popular at the time), Schmucker even declared that “in the newness of the times we are growing back to a touch with nature; a tender, sympathetic, spiritual touch, closer than any of our forebears ever knew.” Perhaps humans had managed nearly to wipe out most of the larger mammals due to overhunting, but ultimately, humans are part of a larger purpose, allied with God in shaping nature. Consider a fruit orchard:

God set the plan for the fruit-trees and we have carried it out. Rarely has man worked better along lines laid down by the Creator. The original trees were doubtless hardier, but that was because they had to take care of themselves. We have relieved them of that necessity, and the new strain has responded to our kindness and rewarded most magnificently man’s skillful endeavor. So it comes that every little country home is glorified at each return of spring by the gorgeous beauty of the blossoming trees,

UGH. I confess it was tough getting through some of this. Schmucker’s natural world is nearly an Eden of human progress and prosperity. Consider the even-tempered tone of this passage, in which Schmucker contemplates how many larger mammals are mostly gone, while the smaller ones are thriving:

The whole rodent family, of which the squirrels are important members, is a striking example of the safety that lies in insignificance. There are more species of rodents than of all other fur-bearing animals combined. Man’s incursions into a neighborhood simply seem to relieve them of their enemies. Rabbits and squirrels are perhaps more abundant to-day than they were when the Indians roamed our forests. Certain it is that the advent of man in the Northwest increased the numbers of the Jack rabbits. This set of animals is unusually adaptable to all the varied possibilities of life…. So they have found for themselves a secure footing where the bear and the woolf, the deer and the bison have failed.

IF THE BISON “FAILED”, THEY WERE HELPED ALONG BY INCESSANT HUNTING FOR SPORT BY ANY WHITE MAN WITH A GUN WHO HAPPENED TO SEE THEM. But while I highlight these passages, it is not completely true that Schmucker has failed to see what humans have done to American nature. For instance, in writing about birds in the Middle Atlantic States, Schmucker acknowledges the Audubon Society and the Nature study movement in public schools as forces that have helped reduce hunting pressures and lead to a generation of birds less fearful of humans. But again, there is strangely little remorse about what has happened. If humans are merely tools of divine purpose, then perhaps it is simply a matter of divining the purpose as to why humans carried out such slaughter of animals for so long a time.

BEFORE I CLOSE, A FEW KINDER WORDS FOR SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SCHMUCKER ARE IN ORDER. This book certainly provides abundant information about aspects of nature for perhaps a middle school or high school reading audience, though it is hardly comprehensive. (It favors rural nature in fields, orchards, and yards over a wilder nature of forest, swamp, and mountainside.) It covers diverse species — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles. And most significantly, I think, it makes a case for organisms that were heavily disliked by most people then (and largely still are, today). For example, in keeping with Schmucker’s purpose-driven outlook on Nature, even the poison ivy has innate value:

[Fall] is perhaps the most tempting season of all the year for a walk, and a country lane beneath the trees is never more lovely. But there is a serpent in this Eden, in the form of a creeping, enticing, but trouble-breeding vine.
Poison Ivy is a bold bad plant. It seems so subtle in its attacks, so bitter in its hatred, that we can hardly help believing it our sworn enemy. But this is only our view of the matter, and plant lovers all know there must be another side to this story. From its own stand-point the plant surely is most ingenious. That it is successful is evident from its abundance. Unless relentlessly weeded out by man, it covers our fence-posts, climbs the trunks of our trees, and clambers about our road-sides.”

What follows is a lengthy section of text enumerating poison ivy’s good points: it has managed to make do with relatively little material in its stem (relying upon various trees for its support), and it provides white berries for birds to eat. These qualities, together with its poisonous oil, have helped insure that the plant is a winner “in life’s race”. The image below, along with many others throughout the book, was done by the author’s wife, Katherine Elizabeth Schmucker.

FINALLY, A FEW PARTING WORDS ABOUT MY COPY. I read a “first edition” from 1910, apparently in very good condition. Not only was it unmarked by earlier owners, but also many of its pages had not even been cut. The paper, however, has clearly deteriorated over time, and is brittle and tears exceedingly easily; one post-it tab I placed on a page, when lifted off, removed a piece of the page, too. The illustrations are quite pleasant, but apart from the title page, not overly inspiring. Even the cover, while colorfully decorated, strikes me as somewhat bland. I suppose the apparent newness of the volume from 1910, its abundance of illustrations, and the relatively unknown nature of the author (who does not have a Wikipedia page yet) left me hoping for great things. I am afraid I am walking away rather disappointed — though, unlike the original owner at least, I did read the book cover to cover. It just didn’t live up to the grace and beauty of its title page.

For Our Entertainment: “Sylvan Secrets in Bird-Songs and Books” by Maurice Thompson, 1887

Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History No Responses »

Sep 042020

From all we can gather it appears most probable that in its present form our songbird proper– our bird with a song to sing — is not much older than man; that he found his song just in time to gladden the ears of God’s last and greatest creation; that he struggled through countless ages and awful changes in order to fit himself for our entertainment. Think what the avian race has endured since first Archaeopteryx felt the feathers begin to bud in his arms! What a long, slow, hesitating, faltering current of development, from a scaly amphibian of the paleozoic time, up, up, to the glorious state of the nightingale and the mocking-bird! I never see a brown thrush flashing his brilliant song from the highest spray of a tree without letting a thought go back over the way he has come to us, and I always feel that to protect and defend the song-bird is one of man’s clearest duties.

I REALLY WANT TO FIND SOMETHING TO LIKE ABOUT MAURICE THOMPSON. The closest I can come is the close of this quote, in which Thompson — the same one that two years previously (as documented in my last post) killed one ivory-billed woodpecker and destroyed the nest of another pair — argues that we ought to protect songbirds. Of course, his rationale doing so is pure 19th Century anthropomorphism. Everything was created for us, pure and simple. Add to that the Great Chain of Being, a warped mismash of the Bible and Darwin, and a really bizarre explanation of the driving force behind evolution, and you have Thompson’s outlook on nature. History books celebrate the winners — the ones who get it right, the ones “ahead of their times”. Thompson most assuredly was not one of those. But his writing does offer a window into a long-gone age of American society, one in which the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the ivory-billed woodpecker all were driven rapidly toward extinction. What mindset made that possible? Here is another passage dripping with anthropocentrism and human entitlement:

The inspired record [the Bible] declares that man was given dominion, which would imply that the earth and all things upon it and in it were made for his benefit. Science may profit by this view of creation, and take the serving of man’s physical and mental needs as the end of evolution. In other words, we may assume that if the object of creation was to make a sphere of man’s dominion while in the human state, then all the lines of creature development have been drawn towards a culmination, have been led to their highest point, in the age of man’s creation; that the Creator perfected the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms before he made man.

WHAT EMERGES IS A SEQUENCE OF LIFE, FROM PRIMITIVE AND LACKING MERIT TO HIGHLY EVOLVED AND MERITORIOUS. In this way, tacking the concept of evolution onto the notion of creation by God, Thompson offers a model in which man reigns supreme and can bask in the knowledge that it has been a long evolutionary journey to arrive at the human being:

All the more honor to the man if indeed he has come up from the germ in the old dust of chaos, has wriggled past the worms, swam past the fishes, outstripped the birds, and made himself the lord of all the animals. Indeed, as I sit here in this tropical springtide, with my eyes full of color-visions and my ears full of soothing sounds, I am willing to consider myself a manifestation of nature’s patient work, the end of a labor begun when life first stirred in the most favored spot of the earth.

THINGS GET REALLY CRAZY ONCE THOMPSON PULLS OUT HIS “SCIENTIFIC” EXPLANATION FOR HOW EVOLUTION WORKS. In his model, it is, well, I will let him explain instead:

Evolution is the outcome of natural desire, and natural desire has been generated by a disturbance of natural equilibrium. There is nothing abstruse or occult in this proposition; it is merely a recognition of the development of intelligence and of the controlling power of the brain in animals.

Lest that seem a bit bewildering, Thompson offers the model in much simpler terms a few pages later:

Evolution tinges everything. One grows like what one contemplates….

My elementary school cafeteria got it wrong: you aren’t what you eat. Instead, you are what you think. And your offspring, over many generations, will become more and more of that. For example,

Birds of the polar areas of snow and ice are white, those of the tropics are vari-colored and brilliant-hued. The condition in each instance has been reached by a natural desire to hide by blending with the prevailing tone of Nature.

And here is a different example:

In the case of wading birds, those species which have chosen to live near small streams have shorter legs and neck that species which prefer larger streams, lakes or sea-borders, and, taking the little green heron as an example, as our streams diminish in volume year by year, the bird modifies its habit in accordance with necessity, and in my mind there is no doubt that its legs and neck will be affected, in the course of a comparatively short period, to a noticeable degree.

If animals evolve by the choices they make and the things they desire, then it follows that it is possible to make better or worse choices. Consider the case of the flying frog of Borneo:

Here is a strange, belated effort of nature to urge the scaleless reptiles up to arboreal, aerial, and song-singing life, by the side of their more fortunate avian kinsmen, who early chose a better method of development!

And yes, this model of various levels (orders) of relative quality extends to other human cultures, too, as this passage reveals:

The woodpecker, beating his unique call on a bit of hard, elastic wood, is making an effort, blind and crude enough, but still an effort, to express a musical mood vaguely floating in his nature. We may not laugh at him, so long as from the interior of Africa explorers bring forth the hideous caricatures of musical instruments that some tribes of our own genus delight themselves withal. Among the Southern negroes it was once common to see a dancer going through an intricate terpsichorean score to the music of a “pat,” which was a rhythmical hand-clapping performed by a companion. I mention this in connection with the suggestion that the chief difference between the highest order of bird-music and the lowest order of man-music is expressed by the word rhythm. There is no such an element as the rhythmic beat in any bird-song that I have heard.

WITH WHITE AMERICAN MALE HUMANS AT THE PINNACLE OF CREATION, THEY ARE FREE TO ACT AS THEY SEE FIT TOWARD EVERYTHING ELSE. Thompson certainly allows for the sentiment of care, but in another essay he writes about a day spent in a Southern swamp during which he wasn’t in the mood for shooting anything — as if blasting away at birds was a perfectly reasonable accompaniment to observing them. Try as I will, I cannot appreciate Thompson as a writer — my mind is stuck on the image of him (from his own essay) standing atop a ladder in the deep woods, tearing through the rotten trunk of a tree in order in order to rob a nest of ivory-billed woodpecker eggs “for the sake of knowledge,” only to watch all five of them plummet to the ground by his own klutziness. “The species will probably be extinct within a few years,” he concluded.

AGAIN, I HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT MY COPY OF THOMPSON’S WORK. The cover is quite impressive, certainly compared to his book of nature essays, “Byways and Bird Notes”, from two years earlier. Otherwise, the book again reveals its age through crumbling binding and yellowed pages, but is without any traces of the journey it has taken to reach me.

Not Quite Impossible: A Review of “The Mystery of Metamorphosis” by Frank Ryan (Sunday at the Archives #23)

Backyard Nature, Books, Insects No Responses »

Jun 012014

“Caterpillar sheds his skin, to find a butterfly within,” Donavan sang in his 1967 Billboard #11 hit song, “There is a Mountain.” The tune, with its simple Buddhist-inspired lyrics and a lovely, catchy flute melody, was recently revived in a recording by Kenny Loggins. In the 2009 Disney music video, Loggins is encircled by joyful young children clapping and shaking tambourines. But metamorphism in insects is far from child’s play. In fact, Donavan’s picture is highly inaccurate. A caterpillar des not molt to reveal a butterfly inside. Instead, it forms a chrysalis, inside which the caterpillar’s body completely dissolves, reconstituting itself as an entirely new organism, a butterfly. Metamorphism in butterflies is much closer to the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes than an actor stepping out of one costume to reveal another one. It is as if two different actors are involved: one to play the role of the caterpillar, the other the butterfly. According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, this odd process developed gradually, in stages, over a vast amount of time. But have you ever stopped to wonder how that could have happened?

Frank Ryan’s 2011 publication, “The Mystery of Metamorphosis: A Scientific Detective Story” explores the question of how metamorphosis may have come about. Strangely enough, metamorphism in animals has not been studied as much as one might imagine. In fact, the currently dominant theory of gradual evolution does not work very well, particularly in cases of metamorphism that occur among invertebrates living in the ocean. And that is where the research of Donald Williamson comes in, and where “The Mystery of Metamorphosis” opens.

Donald Williamson has been studying for decades the larval forms of various sea creatures, including sea stars, brittle stars, sea urchins, and sea squirts. These organisms are classified by their adult forms, because often their larval forms are nothing like the adults. What is even more odd is that not all of the species of these organisms actually undergo metamorphosis at all. A few do not. Others go through very strange metamorphoses indeed. One sea star, Luidia sarsi, has a bilaterally symmetrical, free-swimming larva. Inside the gut of this larva, a tiny adult sea star develops. The larva does not change into the adult. Instead, the larva eventually “births” the adult form, and then continues living for a time on its own, without reproducing. Eventually, the radially symmetrical adult sea stars will reach sexual maturity, broadcast egg and sperm into the water, and the result will be a new generation of larvae.

Then there are the sea squirts. As adults, they look like strange glass tubes attached to the sea floor or perhaps a boat bottom, where they spend their days pumping water into their bodies through one opening and releasing it through another. With the exception of a few diehard couch potatoes, there is no human equivalent to this sessile, brainless organism. As larvae, however, sea squirts resemble miniature tadpoles, with primitive brains and spinal cords. Inside the larval tissues, the adult form begins to develop, almost like a parasite – as if there were two different organisms involved rather than just one. When they are ready to become adults, sea squirts sense the presence of a suitable substrate to attach to, point their bodies head-downward, and begin to lose all of their larval properties. Their tail dissolves, and so do their brains – all to be reconstituted in the adult form.

Studying these odd forms, Williamson proposed a daring evolutionary explanation. What if, early in the history of life, species boundaries weren’t as tightly defined as now? What if organisms were able to hybridize with other organisms of different species, different classes, perhaps even different phyla altogether? Since reproduction took the form of broadcast spawning, it would have been possible – quite likely, in fact – that there were many pairings of egg and sperm from entirely different organisms. If some of these pairings were successful, the result could have been a new organism, maintaining characteristics of both of its forbearers. In such a way, organisms might have developed larval forms that they did not have previously. Imagine the creative potential of a world where cross-hybridization took place! As Ryan relates toward the end of his book, we might not need to imagine that condition at all. Instead, we can look to the fossil record for evidence of just such a possible past, toward the dawn of multicellular life, over 500 million years ago.

Ryan’s book is captivating, even a bit jarring, with its proposal that there may be much more to evolution than the gradualist model proposed by Darwin. “The Mystery of Metamorphosis” is an excellent reminder that there is much that is still unknown, that the development of life on Earth still holds many wonders to explore. It is not easy going, particularly for the reader not schooled in biology in general and the nature of insect homones in particular. But it is worth the journey to explore such wild ideas as these, ideas that conventional Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection might declare impossible. But as Shakespeare observed in “Hamlet”, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This article was originally published on August 19, 2011.