Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson - "Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands"

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Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution

A >> Alpheus Spring Packard >> Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution




1. What are the natural consequences of the influence and the
movements of the waters on the surface of the globe?

2. Why does the sea constantly occupy a basin within the limits
which contain it, and there separate the dry parts of the surface of
the globe always projecting above it?

3. Has the ocean basin always existed where we actually see it, and
if we find proofs of the sojourn of the sea in places where it no
longer remains, by what cause was it found there, and why is it no
longer there?

4. What influence have living bodies exerted on the substances found
on the surface of the earth and which compose the crust which
invests it, and what are the general results of this influence?

Lamarck then disclaims any intentions of framing brilliant hypotheses
based on supposititious principles, but nevertheless, as we shall see,
he falls into this same error, and like others of his period makes some
preposterous hypotheses, though these are far less so than those of
Cuvier's _Discours_. He distinguishes between the action of rivers or of
fresh-water currents, torrents, storms, the melting of snow, and the
work of the ocean. The rivers wear away and bear materials from the
highlands to the lowlands, so that the plains are gradually elevated;
ravines form and become immense valleys, and their sides form elevated
crests and pass into mountain ranges.

He brings out and emphasizes the fact, now so well known, that the
erosive action of rain and rivers has formed mountains of a certain
class.

"It is then evident to me, that every mountain which is not the
result of a _volcanic irruption_ or of some local catastrophe, has
been carved out from a plain, where its mass is gradually formed,
and was a part of it; hence what in this case are the summits of
the mountains are only the remains of the former level of the plain
unless the process of washing away and other means of degradation
have not since reduced its height."

Now this will apply perfectly well to our table-lands, mesas, the
mountains of our bad-lands, even to our Catskills and to many elevations
of this nature in France and in northern Africa. But Lamarck
unfortunately does not stop here, but with the zeal of an innovator, by
no means confined to his time alone, claims that the mountain masses of
the Alps and the Andes were carved out of plains which had been raised
above the sea-level to the present heights of those mountains.

Two causes, he says, have concurred in forming these elevated plains.

"One consists in the continual accumulation of material filling the
portion of the ocean-basin from which the same seas slowly retreat;
for it does not abandon those parts of the ocean-basin which are
situated nearer and nearer to the shores that it tends to leave,
until after having filled its bottom and having gradually raised it.
It follows that the coasts which the sea is abandoning are never
made by a very deep-lying formation, however often it appears to be
such, for they are continually elevated as the result of the
perpetual balancing of the sea, which casts off from its shores all
the sediments brought down by the rivers; in such a way that the
great depths of the ocean are not near the shore from which the sea
retreats, but out in the middle of the ocean and near the opposite
shores which the sea tends to invade.

"The other cause, as we shall see, is found in the detritus of
organic bodies successively accumulated, which perpetually elevates,
although with extreme slowness, the soil of the dry portions of the
globe, and which does it all the more rapidly, as the situation of
these parts gives less play to the degradation of the surface caused
by the rivers.

"Doubtless a plain which is destined some day to furnish the
mountains which the rivers will carve out from its mass would have,
when still but a little way from the sea, but a moderate elevation
above its river channels; but gradually as the ocean basin removed
from this plain, this basin constantly sinking down into the
interior (_epaisseur_) of the external crust of the globe, and the
soil of the plain perpetually rising higher from the deposition of
the detritus of organic bodies, it results that, after ages of
elevation of the plain in question, it would be in the end
sufficiently thick for high mountains to be shaped and carved out of
its mass.

"Although the ephemeral length of life of man prevents his
appreciation of this fact, it is certain that the soil of a plain
unceasingly acquires a real increase in its elevation in proportion
as it is covered with different plants and animals. Indeed the
debris successively heaped up for numerous generations of all these
beings which have by turns perished, and which, as the result of the
action of their organs, have, during the course of this life, given
rise to combinations which would never have existed without this
means, most of the principles which have formed them not being
borrowed from the soil; this debris, I say, wasting successively on
the soil of the plain in question, gradually increases the thickness
of its external bed, multiplies there the mineral matters of all
kinds and gradually elevates the formation."

Our author, as is evident, had no conception, nor had any one else at
the time he wrote, of the slow secular elevation of a continental
plateau by crust-movements, and Lamarck's idea of the formation of
elevated plains on land by the accumulation of debris of organisms is
manifestly inadequate, our aerial or eolian rocks and loess being
wind-deposits of sand and silt rather than matters of organic origin.
Thus he cites as an example of his theory the vast elevated plains of
Tartary, which he thought had been dry land from time immemorable,
though we now know that the rise took place in the quaternary or present
period. On the other hand, given these vast elevated plains, he was
correct in affirming that rivers flowing through them wore out enormous
valleys and carved out high mountains, left standing by atmospheric
erosion, for examples of such are to be seen in the valley of the Nile,
the Colorado, the Upper Missouri, etc.

He then distinguishes between granitic or crystalline mountains, and
those composed of stratified rocks and volcanic mountains.

The erosive action of rivers is thus discussed; they tend first, he
says, to fill up the ocean basins, and second, to make the surface of
the land broken and mountainous, by excavating and furrowing the plains.

Our author did not at all understand the causes of the inclination or
tilting up of strata. Little close observation or field work had yet
been done, and the rocks about Paris are but slightly if at all
disturbed. He attributes the dipping down of strata to the inclination
of the shores of the sea, though he adds that nevertheless it is often
due to local subsidences. And then he remarks that "indeed in many
mountains, and especially in the Pyrenees, in the very centre of these
mountains, we observe that the strata are for the most part either
vertical or so inclined that they more or less approach this direction."

"But," he asks, "should we conclude from this that there has
necessarily occurred a universal catastrophe, a general overturning?
This assumption, so convenient for those naturalists who would
explain all the facts of this kind without taking the trouble to
observe and study the course which nature follows, is not at all
necessary here; for it is easy to conceive that the inclined
direction of the beds in the mountains may have been produced by
other causes, and especially by causes more natural and less
hypothetical than a general overturning of strata."

While streams of fresh water tend to fill up and destroy the ocean
basins, he also insists that the movements of the sea, such as the
tides, currents, storms, submarine volcanoes, etc., on the contrary,
tend to unceasingly excavate and reestablish these basins. Of course we
now know that tides and currents have no effect in the ocean depths,
though their scouring effects near shore in shallow waters have locally
had a marked effect in changing the relations of land and sea. Lamarck
went so far as to insist that the ocean basin owes its existence and its
preservation to the scouring action of the tides and currents.

The earth's interior was, in Lamarck's opinion, solid, formed of
quartzose and silicious rocks, and its centre of gravity did not
coincide with its geographical centre, or what he calls the _centre de
forme_. He imagined also that the ocean revolved around the globe from
east to west, and that this movement, by its continuity, displaced the
ocean basin and made it pass successively over all the surface of the
earth.

Then, in the third chapter, he asks if the basin of the sea has always
been where we now actually see it, and whether we find proofs of the
sojourn of the sea in the place where it is now absent; if so, what are
the causes of these changes. He reiterates his strange idea of a general
movement of the ocean from east to west, at the rate of at least three
leagues in twenty-four hours and due to the moon's influence. And here
Lamarck, in spite of his uniformitarian principles, is strongly
cataclysmic. What he seems to have in mind is the great equatorial
current between Africa and the West Indies. To this perpetual movement
of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean he ventures to attribute the
excavation of the Gulf of Mexico, and presumes that at the end of ages
it will break through the Isthmus of Panama, and transform America into
two great islands or two small continents. Not understanding that the
islands are either the result of upheaval, or outliers of continents,
due to subsidence, Lamarck supposed that his westward flow of the ocean,
due to the moon's attraction, eroded the eastern shores of America, and
the currents thus formed "in their efforts to move westward, arrested by
America and by the eastern coasts of China, were in great part diverted
towards the South Pole, and seeking to break through a passage across
the ancient continent have, a long time since, reduced the portion of
this continent which united New Holland to Asia into an archipelago
which comprises the Molucca, Philippine, and Mariana Islands." The West
Indies and Windward Islands were formed by the same means, and the sea
not breaking through the Isthmus of Panama was turned southward, and the
action of its currents resulted in detaching the island of Tierra del
Fuego from South America. In like manner New Zealand was separated from
New Holland, Madagascar from Africa, and Ceylon from India.

He then refers to other "displacements of the ocean basin," to the
shallowing of the Straits of Sunda, of the Baltic Sea, the ancient
subsidence of the coast of Holland and Zealand, and states that Sweden
offers all the appearance of having recently emerged from the sea, while
the Caspian Sea, formerly much larger than at present, was once in
communication with the Black Sea, and that some day the Straits of Sunda
and the Straits of Dover will be dry land, so that the union of England
and France will be formed anew.

Strangely enough, with these facts known to him, Lamarck did not see
that such changes were due to changes of level of the land rather than
to their being abandoned or invaded by the sea, but explained these by
his bizarre hypothesis of westward-flowing currents due to the moon's
action; though it should be in all fairness stated that down to recent
times there have been those who believed that it is the sea and not the
land which has changed its level.

This idea, that the sea and not the land has changed its level, was
generally held at the time Lamarck wrote, though Strabo had made the
shrewd observation that it was the land which moved. The Greek
geographer threw aside the notion of some of his contemporaries, and
with wonderful prevision, considering the time he wrote and the limited
observations he could make, claimed that it is not the sea which has
risen or fallen, but the land itself which is sometimes raised up and
sometimes depressed, while the sea-bottom may also be elevated or sunk
down. He refers to such facts as deluges, earthquakes, and volcanic
eruptions, and sudden swellings of the land beneath the sea.

"And it is not merely the small, but the large islands also, not
merely the islands, but the continents which can be lifted up
together with the sea; and, too, the large and small tracts may
subside, for habitations and cities, like Bure, Bizona, and many
others, have been engulfed by earthquakes."[75]

But it was not until eighteen centuries later that this doctrine, under
the teachings of Playfair, Leopold von Buch, and Elie de Beaumont
(1829-30) became generally accepted. In 1845 Humboldt remarked, "It is a
fact to-day recognized by all geologists, that the rise of continents is
due to an actual upheaval, and not to an apparent subsidence occasioned
by a general depression of the level of the sea" (_Cosmos_, i). Yet as
late as 1869 we have an essay by H. Trautschold[76] in which is a
statement of the arguments which can be brought forward in favor of the
doctrine that the increase of the land above sea level is due to the
retirement of the sea.[77]

As authentic and unimpeachable proofs of the former existence of the sea
where now it is absent, Lamarck cites the occurrence of fossils in rocks
inland. Lamarck's first paper on fossils was read to the Institute in
1799, or about three years previous to the publication of the
_Hydrogeologie_. He restricts the term "fossils" to vegetable and animal
remains, since the word in his time was by some loosely applied to
minerals as well as fossils; to anything dug out of the earth. "We find
fossils," he says, "on dry land, even in the middle of continents and
large islands; and not only in places far removed from the sea, but even
on mountains and in their bowels, at considerable heights, each part of
the earth's surface having at some time been a veritable ocean bottom."
He then quotes at length accounts of such instances from Buffon, and
notices their prodigious number, and that while the greater number are
marine, others are fresh-water and terrestrial shells, and the marine
shells may be divided into littoral and pelagic.

"This distinction is very important to make, because the
consideration of fossils is, as we have already said, one of the
principal means of knowing well the revolutions which have taken
place on the surface of our globe. This subject is of great
importance, and under this point of view it should lead naturalists
to study fossil shells, in order to compare them with their
analogues which we can discover in the sea; finally, to carefully
seek the places where each species lives, the banks which are
formed of them, the different beds which these banks may present,
etc., etc., so that we do not believe it out of place to insert here
the principal considerations which have already resulted from that
which is known in this respect.

"_The fossils which are found in the dry parts of the surface of the
globe are evident indications of a long sojourn of the sea in the very
places where we observe them._" Under this heading, after repeating the
statement previously made that fossils occur in all parts of the dry
land, in the midst of the continents and on high mountains, he inquires
_by what cause_ so many marine shells could be found in the explored
parts of the world. Discarding the old idea that they are monuments of
the deluge, transformed into fossils, he denies that there was such a
general catastrophe as a universal deluge, and goes on to say in his
assured, but calm and philosophic way:

"On the globe which we inhabit, everything is submitted to continual
and inevitable changes, which result from the essential order of
things: they take place, in truth, with more or less promptitude or
slowness, according to the nature, the condition, or the situation
of the objects; nevertheless they are wrought in some time or other.

"To nature, time is nothing, and it never presents a difficulty; she
always has it at her disposal, and it is for her a means without
limit, with which she has made the greatest as well as the least
things.

"The changes to which everything in this world is subjected are
changes not only of form and of nature, but they are changes also of
bulk, and even of situation.

"All the considerations stated in the preceding chapters should
convince us that nothing on the surface of the terrestrial globe is
immutable. They teach us that the vast ocean which occupies so great
a part of the surface of our globe cannot have its bed constantly
fixed in the same place; that the dry or exposed parts of this
surface themselves undergo perpetual changes in their condition, and
that they are in turn successively invaded and abandoned by the sea.

"There is, indeed, every evidence that these enormous masses of
water continually displace themselves, both their bed and their
limits.

"In truth these displacements, which are never interrupted, are in
general only made with extreme and almost inappreciable slowness,
but they are in ceaseless operation, and with such constancy that
the ocean bottom, which necessarily loses on one side while it gains
on another, has already, without doubt, spread over not only once,
but even several times, every point of the surface of the globe.

"If it is thus, if each point of the surface of the terrestrial
globe has been in turn dominated by the seas--that is to say, has
contributed to form the bed of those immense masses of water which
constitute the ocean--it should result (1) that the insensible but
uninterrupted transfer of the bed of the ocean over the whole
surface of the globe has given place to deposits of the remains of
marine animals which we should find in a fossil state; (2) that this
translation of the ocean basin should be the reason why the dry
portions of the earth are always more elevated than the level of the
sea; so that the old ocean bed should become exposed without being
elevated above the sea, and without consequently giving rise to the
formation of mountains which we observe in so many different regions
of the naked parts of our globe."

Thus littoral shells of many genera, such as Pectens, Tellinae, cockle
shells, turban shells (_sabots_), etc., madrepores and other littoral
polyps, the bones of marine or of amphibious animals which have lived
near the sea, and which occur as fossils, are then unimpeachable
monuments of the sojourn of the sea on the points of the dry parts of
the globe where we observe their deposits, and besides these occur
deep-water forms. "Thus the encrinites, the belemnites, the
orthoceratites, the ostracites, the terebratules, etc., all animals
which habitually live at the bottom, found for the most part among the
fossils deposited on the point of the globe in question, are
unimpeachable witnesses which attest that this same place was once part
of the bottom or great depths of the sea." He then attempts to prove,
and does so satisfactorily, that the shells he refers to are what he
calls deep-water (pelagiennes). He proves the truth of his thesis by the
following facts:

1. We are already familiar with a marine Gryphaea, and different
Terebratulae, also marine shell-fish, which do not, however, live
near shore. 2. Also the greatest depth which has been reached with
the rake or the dredge is not destitute of molluscs, since we find
there a great number which only live at this depth, and without
instruments to reach and bring them up we should know nothing of the
_cones_, _olives_, Mitra, many species of Murex, Strombus, etc. 3.
Finally, since the discovery of a living Encrinus, drawn up on a
sounding line from a great depth, and where lives the animal or
polyp in question, it is not only possible to assure ourselves that
at this depth there are other living animals, but on the contrary we
are strongly bound to think that other species of the same genus,
and probably other animals of different genera, also live at the
same depths. All this leads one to admit, with Bruguiere,[78] the
existence of deep-water shell-fish and polyps, which, like him, I
distinguish from littoral shells and polyps.

"The two sorts of monuments of which I have above spoken, namely,
littoral and deep-sea fossils, may be, and often should be, found
separated by different beds in the same bank or in the same
mountains, since they have been deposited there at very different
epochs. But they may often be found mixed together, because the
movements of the water, the currents, submarine volcanoes, etc.,
have overturned the beds, yet some regular deposits in water always
tranquil would be left in quite distant beds.... Every dry part of
the earth's surface, when the presence or the abundance of marine
fossils prove that formerly the sea has remained in that place, has
necessarily twice received, for a single incursion of the sea,
littoral shells, and once deep-sea shells, in three different
deposits--this will not be disputed. But as such an incursion of the
sea can only be accomplished by a period of immense duration, it
follows that the littoral shells deposited at the first sojourn of
the edge of the sea, and constituting the first deposit, have been
destroyed--that is to say, have not been preserved to the present
time; while the deep-water shells form the second deposit, and there
the littoral shells of the third deposit are, in fact, the only ones
which now exist, and which constitute the fossils that we see."

He again asserts that these deposits could not be the result of any
sudden catastrophe, because of the necessarily long sojourn of the sea
to account for the extensive beds of fossil shells, the remains of
"infinitely multiplied generations of shelled animals which have lived
in this place, and have there successively deposited their debris." He
therefore supposes that these remains, "continually heaped up, have
formed these shell banks, become fossilized after the lapse of
considerable time, and in which it is often possible to distinguish
different beds." He then continues his line of anti-catastrophic
reasoning, and we must remember that in his time facts in biology and
geology were feebly grasped, and scientific reasoning or induction was
in its infancy.

"I would again inquire how, in the supposition of a universal
catastrophe, there could have been preserved an infinity of delicate
shells which the least shock would break, but of which we now find a
great number uninjured among other fossils. How also could it happen
that bivalve shells, with which calcareous rocks and even those
changed into a silicious condition are interlarded, should be all
still provided with their two valves, as I have stated, if the
animals of these shells had not lived in these places?

"There is no doubt but that the remains of so many molluscs, that so
many shells deposited and consequently changed into fossils, and
most of which were totally destroyed before their substance became
silicified, furnished a great part of the calcareous matter which we
observe on the surface and in the upper beds of the earth.

"Nevertheless there is in the sea, for the formation of calcareous
matter, a cause which is greater than shelled molluscs, which is
consequently still more powerful, and to which must be referred
ninety-nine hundredths, and indeed more, of the calcareous matter
occurring in nature. This cause, so important to consider, is the
existence of _coralligenous polyps_, which we might therefore call
_testaceous polyps_, because, like the testaceous molluscs, these
polyps have the faculty of forming, by a transudation or a continual
secretion of their bodies, the stony and calcareous polypidom on
which they live.

"In truth these polyps are animals so small that a single one only
forms a minute quantity of calcareous matter. But in this case what
nature does not obtain in any volume or in quantity from any one
individual, she simply receives by the number of animals in
question, through the enormous multiplicity of these animals, and
their astonishing fecundity--namely, by the wonderful faculty they
have of promptly regenerating, of multiplying in a short time their
generations successively, and rapidly accumulating; finally, by the
total amount of reunion of the products of these numerous little
animals.

"Moreover, it is a fact now well known and well established that the
coralligenous polyps, namely, this great family of animals with
coral stocks, such as the millepores, the madrepores, astraeae,
meandrinae, etc., prepare on a great scale at the bottom of the sea,
by a continual secretion of their bodies, and as the result of their
enormous multiplication and their accumulated generations, the
greatest part of the calcareous matter which exists. The numerous
coral stocks which these animals produce, and whose bulk and numbers
perpetually increase, form in certain places islands of considerable
extent, fill up extensive bays, gulfs, and roadsteads; in a word,
close harbors, and entirely change the condition of coasts.

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