fossils

[kindkit]

Having now read chapter 104 of Moby Dick, "The Fossil Whale," I can now add Melville to Tennyson on my mental list of literary writers who, pre-Darwin*, tried to make sense of fossil evidence of extinct species.

Melville:

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated ante-chronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake upon the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaohs'. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all human ages are over.

And Tennyson, from In Memoriam; earlier in the poem he's been grieving over how nature cares for the type (species) but not the individual life, and then it gets worse:

"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She [nature] cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more."

They both arrive at the horror of the uncaring universe. Tennyson ultimately rejects the idea; I don't think Melville's going to.

Does anybody know of other pre-Darwin writers who look at this issue? It's something I'm kind of fascinated by.


*Of course knowledge of fossils and of deep geological time pre-date The Origin of Species. It's the gap between that knowledge--that time is orders of magnitude longer than the Biblical narrative, and that hundreds, thousands, countless species supposedly specially created by God have simply ceased to exist--and Darwin's explanation of mechanisms that is so interesting. And I think maybe it's from that gap specifically that Melville's particular kind of cosmic horror comes.

Comments

[greenwoodside]

I can't think of any others after some head-scratching and a stubborn refusal to resort to Google, but it's a beautiful post and a fascinating question.

[kindkit]

I've been kind of obsessed with that bit of In Memoriam for years, and Moby Dick is the first other book I've come across that does anything similar (not that I'm very well read in the period). Dickens has the famous bit at the start of Bleak House where he imagines a brontosaurus walking up the street, but it's just a brief reference. I suspect Dickens of being too conventional to fully pursue the idea.