12 THE COMING [CH. 



The idea of * descent with modification/ derived 

 from the early speculations of hunters and herdsmen, 

 is really a much nobler and more beautiful conception 

 of * creation' than that of the ' fashioning out of 

 clay/ which commended itself to the primitive agri- 

 culturalists. 



Lyell writing to his friend John Herschel, who 

 like himself believed in the derivation of new species 

 from pre-existing ones by the action of secondary 

 causes, wrote in 1836 : 



'When I first came to the notion,... of a succession of 

 extinction of species, and creation of new ones, going on* per- 

 petually now, and through an indefinite period of the past, and to 

 continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the changes 

 which must continue in the inanimate and habitable earth, the 

 idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever conceived, so far 

 as regards the attributes of the Presiding Mind 7 .' 



And Darwin concludes his presentment of the 

 doctrine of evolution in the Origin of Species in 1859 

 with the following sentence : 



* There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several 

 powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few 

 forms or into one ; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on 

 according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning 

 endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and 

 are being, evolved 8 .' 



Compare with these suggestions the ideas em- 

 bodied in the following lines ideas of which the 



