Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and separation, once brought into the flood or exodus narratives, reiterates
the more basic theological point that salvation comes from above and that
Noah, Moses, and all others who work the restoration of the fallen creation
are only God's human instruments. Thus we see that the primordial sepa-
ration of “the waters from the waters” (Genesis 1:6) is also the context in
which a small remnant of living things is saved from the great flood. Even
though it is through Noah's heroics that these survivors float between the
“fountains of the great deep” and the rains falling from the “windows of the
heavens” (Genesis 7:11), it is not Noah but rather God who saves. Similar
imagery appears when the infant Moses is cast upon the Nile in a boat of
reeds, and even more vividly when Israel departs from Egypt through the
parted waters of the Red Sea. This association of rebirth or salvation with
the separation of waters plays out once again in the Christian rite of bap-
tism, which finds the initiate buried in water and then drawn out from it as
a new creature. Outside the Bible, we see this primordial symbolism in the
boat journey that precedes Dante's ascent up the mount of purgatory and in
the river that separates heaven from earth in Bunyan's allegory. Not every
biblical event does this; it is only when human deeds are particularly exalted
that an event's superseding divine origins need to be reiterated, lest there
should be theological confusion.
The counterparts to this in Huxley's topic are those echoes of the evo-
lutionary story that resound whenever he takes up the subject of human
and scientific history. He recapitulates the root act of creation—nature's evo-
lutionary work of bringing the new from the old—in certain human acts,
scientific ones specifically, by bringing them into symbolic coincidence with
this primordial model. The evolving world of science is symbolically har-
monized with the biological world. Thus regarded, the various moments in
which Huxley seems to turn aside from his overt scientific subject matter
are not deviations from his subject so much as variations upon the topic's
evolutionary theme.
One might think that these symbolic associations were merely acciden-
tal, but the pattern of analogy is too persistent and too obvious to tolerate
such an explanation. To wave this off would be like supposing that Emily
Brontë's descriptions of the English moors in
Wuthering Heights
are mere
side notes on ecological land classification and that the verbal association
between the barrenness of the story's rocky and heath-covered setting and
the name “Heathcliff” was merely coincidental. We expect such associations
in fiction and may even look for them, but the fact that Huxley's topic pres-
ents itself as a work of science will make us much less likely to notice such
