第57章

The Master gets going sometimes, there is no denying it, until his imagination runs away with him.He had been trying, as the reader sees, one of those curious experiments in spontaneous generation, as it is called, which have been so often instituted of late years, and by none more thoroughly than by that eminent American student of nature (Professor Jeffries Wyman) whose process he had imitated with a result like his.

We got talking over these matters among us the next morning at the breakfast-table.

We must agree they couldn't stand six hours' boiling,--I said.

--Good for the Pope of Rome!--exclaimed the Master.

--The Landlady drew back with a certain expression of dismay in her countenance.She hoped he did n't want the Pope to make any more converts in this country.She had heard a sermon only last Sabbath, and the minister had made it out, she thought, as plain as could be, that the Pope was the Man of Sin and that the Church of Rome was--Well, there was very strong names applied to her in Scripture.

What was good for the Pope was good for your minister, too, my dear madam,--said the Master.Good for everybody that is afraid of what people call "science." If it should prove that dead things come to life of themselves, it would be awkward, you know, because then somebody will get up and say if one dead thing made itself alive another might, and so perhaps the earth peopled itself without any help.Possibly the difficulty wouldn't be so great as many people suppose.We might perhaps find room for a Creator after all, as we do now, though we see a little brown seed grow till it sucks up the juices of half an acre of ground, apparently all by its own inherent power.That does not stagger us; I am not sure that it would if Mr.

Crosses or Mr.Weekes's acarus should show himself all of a sudden, as they said he did, in certain mineral mixtures acted on by electricity.

The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this time.

The Master turned to me.---Don't think too much of the result of our one experiment.It means something, because it confirms those other experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a hundred negatives don't settle such a question.Life does get into the world somehow.You don't suppose Adam had the cutaneous unpleasantness politely called psora, do you?

--Hardly,--I answered.---He must have been a walking hospital if he carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his descendants.

--Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that special complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things? You don't suppose there was a special act of creation for the express purpose of bestowing that little wretch on humanity, do you?

I thought, on the whole, I would n't answer that question.

--You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young Astronomer to the Master.---I have looked into a microscope now and then, and I have seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in a fluid, which you call molecular motion.Just so, when I look through my telescope I see the star-dust whirling about in the infinite expanse of ether; or if I do not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its immeasurable distance.Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere.You ask why your restless microscopic atoms may not come together and become self-conscious and self-moving organisms.I ask why my telescopic star-dust may not come together and grow and organize into habitable worlds,--the ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I may borrow from our friend the Poet's province.It frightens people, though, to hear the suggestion that worlds shape themselves from star-mist.It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are nothing but raindrops.But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop grows, why then-- It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.

Sir John Herschel would have told them that this made little difference in accounting for the formation of worlds by aggregation, but at any rate it was a comfort to them.

--These people have always been afraid of the astronomers,--said the Master.--They were shy, you know, of the Copernican system, for a long while; well they might be with an oubliette waiting for them if they ventured to think that the earth moved round the sun.Science settled that point finally for them, at length, and then it was all right,--when there was no use in disputing the fact any longer.By and by geology began turning up fossils that told extraordinary stories about the duration of life upon our planet.What subterfuges were not used to get rid of their evidence! Think of a man seeing the fossilized skeleton of an animal split out of a quarry, his teeth worn down by mastication, and the remains of food still visible in his interior, and, in order to get rid of a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to, seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a sham, a Barnum's-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon his intelligent children! And now people talk about geological epochs and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly as if they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers.Ten or a dozen years ago people said Sh! Sh! if you ventured to meddle with any question supposed to involve a doubt of the generally accepted Hebrew traditions.To-day such questions are recognized as perfectly fair subjects for general conversation; not in the basement story, perhaps, or among the rank and file of the curbstone congregations, but among intelligent and educated persons.