To most scientific men it would
have been merely the discovery of an interesting intermediate
organism--something sure to make the reputation of a comparative
anatomist; to him, it was an awful and sudden blow dealt unexpectedly
from the most deadly quarter at all his deepest and most sacred
principles. Religion, honour, Truth, the very fundamental basis of the
universe itself--all that makes life worth living for, all that makes
the world endurable--was bound up implicitly that moment for Cyril
Milliter in the simple question whether the shadowy creature, printed in
faint grey outline on the slab of shaly oolite before him, was or was
not half bird and half lizard. It may have been foolish of him: it may have been wrong: it may have
been madness almost; but at that instant he felt dazzled and stunned by
the crushing weight of the blow thus unexpectedly dealt at his whole
preconceived theory of things, and at his entire mental scheme of
science and theology. The universe seemed to swim aimlessly before him:
he felt the solid ground knocked at once from beneath his feet, and
found himself in one moment suspended alone above an awful abyss, a
seething and tossing abyss of murky chaos. He had pinned all his
tottering faith absolutely on that single frail support; and now the
support had given way irretrievably beneath him, and blank atheism,
nihilism, utter nothingness, stared him desperately in the face. In one
minute, while he held his head tight between his two palms to keep it
from bursting, and looked with a dull, glazed, vacant eye at the ghastly
thing before him--only a few indistinct fossil bones, but to him the
horridest sight he had ever beheld--a whole world of ideas crowded
itself on the instant into his teeming, swimming brain. If we could
compress an infinity of thought into a single second, said Shelley once,
that second would be eternity; and on the brink of such a compressed
eternity Cyril Milliter was then idly sitting. It seemed to him, as he
clasped his forehead tighter and tighter, that the Truth which he had
been seeking, and for which he had been working and fighting so long,
revealed itself to him now and there, at last, in concrete form, as a
visible and tangible Lie. It was no mere petrified lizard that he saw
beneath his eyes, but a whole ruined and shattered system of philosophic
theology. His cosmogony was gone; his cosmos itself was dispersed and
disjointed; creation, nay, the Creator Himself, seemed to fade away
slowly into nonentity before him. He beheld dimly an awful vision of a
great nebulous mist, drifting idly before the angry storm-cyclones of
the masterless universe--drifting without a God or a ruler to guide it;
bringing forth shapeless monstrosities one after another on its wrinkled
surface; pregnant with ravine, and rapine, and cruelty; vast, powerful,
illimitable, awful; but without one ray of light, one gleam of love, one
hope of mercy, one hint of divine purpose anywhere to redeem it. It was
the pessimistic nightmare of a Lucretian system, translated hastily into
terms of Cyril Milliter's own tottering and fading theosophy. He took the thing up again into his trembling hands, and examined it a
second time more closely. No, there could be no shadow of a doubt about
it: his professional skill and knowledge told him that much in a single
moment. Nor could he temporize and palter with the discovery, as some of
his elder brethren would have been tempted to do; his brain was too
young, and fresh, and vigorous, and logical not to permit of ready
modification before the evidence of new facts. Come what might, he must
be loyal to the Truth. This thing, this horrid thing that he held
visibly before him, was a fact, a positive fact: a set of real bones,
representing a real animal, that had once lived and breathed and flown
about veritably upon this planet of ours, and that was yet neither a
true bird nor a true lizard, but a half-way house and intermediate link
between those two now widely divergent classes. Cyril Milliter's mind
was at once too honest and too intelligent to leave room for any doubts,
or evasions, or prevarications with itself upon that fundamental
subject. He saw quite clearly and instantly that it was the very thing
the possibility of whose existence he had so stoutly denied that
self-same morning. And he could not go back upon his own words,
"Whenever they show me an organism which unites in itself the
characteristics of birds and reptiles, then, and then only, will I
accede to their absurd hypothesis." The organism he had asked for lay
now before him, and he knew himself in fact a converted evolutionist,
encumbered with all the other hideous corollaries which his own peculiar
logic had been accustomed to tack on mentally to that hated creed. He
almost felt as if he ought in pure consistency to go off at once and
murder somebody, as the practical outcome of his own theories. For had
he not often boldly asserted that evolutionism was inconsistent with
Theism, and that without Theism, any real morality or any true
right-doing of any kind was absolutely impossible? At last, after long sitting and anxious pondering, Cyril Milliter rose
to go home, carrying a heavy heart along with him. And then the question
began to press itself practically upon him, What could he ever do with
this horrible discovery? His first impulse was to dash the thing to
pieces against the rock, and go away stealthily, saying naught about the
matter to any man. But his inborn reverence for the Truth made him
shrink back in horror, a moment later, from this suggestion of Satan, as
he thought it--this wicked notion of suppressing a most important and
conclusive piece of scientific evidence. His next idea was simply to
leave it where it was, thus shuffling off the responsibility of
publishing it or destroying it upon the next comer who chanced by
accident to enter the quarry. After all, he said to himself,
hypocritically, he wasn't absolutely bound to tell anybody else a word
about it; he could leave it there, and it would be in much the same
position, as far as science was concerned, as it would have been if he
hadn't happened to catch sight of it accidentally as it lay that morning
in the mother stone. But again his conscience told him next moment that
such casuistry was dishonest and unworthy; he had found the thing, and,
come what might, he ought to abide by the awful consequences. If he left
it lying there in the quarry, one of the workmen would probably smash it
up carelessly with a blow of his pick to-morrow morning--this unique
survivor of a forgotten world--and to abandon it to such a fate as that
would be at least as wicked as to break it to pieces himself of set
purpose, besides being a great deal more sneakish and cowardly. No,
whatever else he did, it was at any rate his plain duty to preserve the
specimen, and to prevent it from being carelessly or wilfully destroyed.