The Reception of the Origin of Species | Page 8

applied them to plants. But the advocates of his claims have failed to show that he, in any respect, anticipated the central idea of the 'Origin of Species.')
But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as in the venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious conviction that Evolution, after all, would turn out true. I have recently read afresh the first edition of the 'Principles of Geology'; and when I consider that this remarkable book had been nearly thirty years in everybody's hands, and that it brings home to any reader of ordinary intelligence a great principle and a great fact--the principle, that the past must be explained by the present, unless good cause be shown to the contrary; and the fact, that, so far as our knowledge of the past history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be shown (The same principle and the same fact guide the result from all sound historical investigation. Grote's 'History of Greece' is a product of the same intellectual movement as Lyell's 'Principles.')--I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief agent for smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully eliminated from sober geological speculation.
In fact, no one was better aware of this than Lyell himself. (Lyell, with perfect right, claims this position for himself. He speaks of having "advocated a law of continuity even in the organic world, so far as possible without adopting Lamarck's theory of transmutation"...
"But while I taught that as often as certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it remained for Darwin to accumulate proof that there is no break between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work of evolution, and not of special creation...
"I had certainly prepared the way in this country, in six editions of my work before the 'Vestiges of Creation' appeared in 1842 [1844], for the reception of Darwin's gradual and insensible evolution of species."--'Life and Letters,' Letter to Haeckel, volume ii. page 436. November 23, 1868.) If one reads any of the earlier editions of the 'Principles' carefully (especially by the light of the interesting series of letters recently published by Sir Charles Lyell's biographer), it is easy to see that, with all his energetic opposition to Lamarck, on the one hand, and to the ideal quasi-progressionism of Agassiz, on the other, Lyell, in his own mind, was strongly disposed to account for the origination of all past and present species of living things by natural causes. But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of creation for a natural process which he imagined to be incomprehensible.
In a letter addressed to Mantell (dated March 2, 1827), Lyell speaks of having just read Lamarck; he expresses his delight at Lamarck's theories, and his personal freedom from any objection based on theological grounds. And though he is evidently alarmed at the pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine, he observes:--
"But, after all, what changes species may really undergo! How impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line, beyond which some of the so-called extinct species have never passed into recent ones."
Again, the following remarkable passage occurs in the postscript of a letter addressed to Sir John Herschel in 1836:--
"In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention of intermediate causes. I left this rather to be inferred, not thinking it worth while to offend a certain class of persons by embodying in words what would only be a speculation." (In the same sense, see the letter to Whewell, March 7, 1837, volume ii., page 5:--
"In regard to this last subject [the changes from one set of animal and vegetable species to another]...you remember what Herschel said in his letter to me. If I had stated as plainly as he has done the possibility of the introduction or origination of fresh species being a natural, in contradistinction to a miraculous process, I should have raised a host of prejudices against me, which are unfortunately opposed at every step to any philosopher who attempts to address the public on these mysterious subjects." See also letter to