Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/278

The most interesting point about the whole passage, however, is probably that connected with Poe's ideas on the origin of animal organisms. Is he here stating the true theory of the descent of each from lower forms? Or, is his view a revival of that held by several Greek philosophers and in modern times by Duret and Oken, of the direct production of species by natural causes?^[1] In Poe's tale "Some Words with a Mummy," published in 1845, the resuscitated Egyptian replies to a query concerning the creation, thus:

During my time I never knew any one to entertain so singular a fancy as that the universe (or this world, if you will have it so) ever had a beginning at all. I remember once, and once only, hearing something remotely hinted, by a man of many speculations, concerning the origin of the human race, and by this individual the very word Adam (or Red Earth), which you make use of, was employed. He employed it, however, in a generical sense, with reference to the spontaneous germination from rank soil (just as a thousand of the lower genera of creatures are germinated)—the spontaneous germination, I say, of five vast hordes of men, simultaneously upspringing in five distinct and nearly equal divisions of the globe.^[2]

How far this is jest and how far earnest is hard to say.

Of the mental development of man, Poe does not speak in "Eureka." From passages elsewhere (chiefly in "Marginalia") he seeems to have thought humanity had progressed along religious, scientific and esthetic lines, but pessimistic remarks of an opposite character are not wanting in his writings.

The only passage elsewhere which alludes to the subject is contained in a letter, written shortly after the publication of "Eureka" to the editor of the "Literary World" in answer to some strictures a correspondent had made on the work. It reads as follows:

"The third misrepresentation lies in a foot-note, where the critic says: 'Further than this, Mr. Poe's claim that he can account for the existence of all organic beings—man included—merely from those principles on which the origin and present appearance of suns and

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itant dissipation of emotion: during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." "First Principles," p. 334. There seems to be considerable correspondence between Poe's "condensation "and Spencer's "integration."

1. The following extract from Oken deserves to be cited as showing how, in any event, Poe's views were as reasonable as those propounded by one regarded as a forerunner of Darwin: "Man also is the offspring of some warm and gentle seashore, and probably rose in India, where the first peaks appeared above the waters. A certain mingling of water, of blood warmth, and of atmosphere, must have conjoined for his production, and this may have happened only once and at one spot." Quoted by H. F. Osborn, in his work "From the Greeks to Darwin," p. 127. Among the Greeks who propounded the hypothesis of the direct natural production of organisms from the elements were Thales, Anaxagoras and Empedocles.
2. "Works," Vol. II., p. 301.