xii] OF EVOLUTION 151 



There is a tendency, when a great man has passed 

 from our midst, to estimate his merits and labours 

 with undiscriminating, and often perhaps exaggerated, 

 admiration ; and this excessive praise is too often 

 followed by a reaction, as the result of which the 

 idol of one generation becomes almost commonplace 

 to the next. A still further period is required before 

 the proper position of mental perspective is reached 

 by us, and a just judgment can be formed of the 

 man's real place in history. The reputations of both 

 Lyell and Darwin have, I think, passed through both 

 these two earlier phases of thought, and we may have 

 arrived at the third stage. 



There was one respect in which both Lyell and 

 Darwin failed to satisfy many both of their con- 

 temporaries and successors. Lyell, like Button, 

 always deprecated attempts to go back to a 'beginning/ 

 while Darwin, who strongly supported Lyell in his 

 geological views, was equally averse to speculations 

 concerning the 'origin of life on the globe/ Scrope 146 , 

 and also Huxley 147 in his earlier days, held the 

 opinion that it was legitimate to assume or imagine a 

 beginning, from which, with ever diminishing energy, 

 the existing 'comparatively quiet conditions,' thought 

 to characterise the present order of the world, would 

 be reached. Both Lyell and Darwin insisted that 

 geology is a historical science, and must be treated 

 as such quite distinct from Cosmogony. And in the 



