xi] OF EVOLUTION 145 



friend's investigations with the deepest interest, his 

 less sanguine nature led him often to despair of the 

 possibility of solving * the mystery of mysteries/ As 

 Darwin wrote only a year before his own death, Lyell 

 'would advance all possible objections to my sugges- 

 tions, and even after these were exhausted would 

 long remain dubious 2 ' It is evident from the cor- 

 respondence that Darwin was at times tempted to 

 become impatient with the friend, for whose advocacy 

 of his views he so deeply longed. Fourteen years 

 after the publication of the Origin of Species, how- 

 ever, Lyell, in his Antiquity of Man, gave in his 

 adhesion to Darwin's theory but, even then, not in 

 the unqualified manner that the latter desired. Yet 

 I have reason to know that some years before his 

 death, Lyell was able to assure his friend of his 

 complete agreement, and Darwin, six years after the 

 loss of his friend, wrote, 'His candour was highly 

 remarkable. He exhibited this by becoming a con- 

 vert to the Descent theory, though he had gained 

 much fame by opposing Lamarck's views, and this 

 after he had grown old' Darwin adds that Lyell, 

 referring to the 'fatal age ' of sixty, said ' he hoped 

 that now he might be allowed to live 143 ! ' 



When I first came into personal relations with 

 Darwin, after the death of Lyell in 1875, he was in 

 the habit of deprecating any idea of his writing on 

 theoretical questions. He used to talk of ' playing 



j. E. 10 



