176 FOUNDATIONS OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, [ch. ix. 



praised, may have favoured my upholding them under a 

 different form in my Origin of Species. At this time I ad- 

 mired greatly the Zoonomia ; but on reading it a second 

 time after an interval of ten or fifteen years, I was much 

 disappointed ; the proportion of speculation being so large 

 to the facts given." 



Mr. Huxley has well said {Obituary Notice, p. ii.) : 

 " Erasmus Darwin was in fact an anticipator of Lamarck, 

 and not of Charles Darwin ; there is no trace in his works 

 of the conception by the addition of which his grandson 

 metamorphosed the theory of evolution as applied to living 

 things, and gave it a new foundation." 



On the whole it seems to me that the effect on his mind 

 of the earlier evolutionists was inappreciable, and as far as 

 concerns the history of the Origin of Species, it is of no 

 particular importance, because, as before said, evolution 

 made no progress in his mind until the cause of modifica- 

 tion was conceivable. 



I think Mr. Huxley is right in saying * that " it is hard- 

 ly too much to say that Darwin's greatest work is the 

 outcome of the unflinching application to biology of the 

 leading idea, and the method applied in the Principles to 

 Geology." Mr. Huxley has elsewhere f admirably expressed 

 the bearing of Lyell's work in this connection : 



" I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for my- 

 self, was the chief agent in 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 specu- 

 lation. . . . 



" Lyell, \ with perfect right, claims this position for him- 

 self. He speaks of having ' advocated a law of continuity 

 even in the organic world, so far as possible without adopt- 

 ing Lamarck's theory of transmutation. . . . 



" ' But while I taught,' Lyell goes on, ' that as often as 

 certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons 

 quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of 



* Obituary Notice, p. viii. 



t Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 190. In Mr. Huxley's chapter the passage 

 beginning " Lyell with perfect right . . . ." is given as a footnote : it will be 

 seen that 1 have incorporated it with Mr. Huxley's text. 



% Lyell's Life and Letters, Letter to Haeckef, vol. ii. p. 436. Nov. 23, 1868. 



