604 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be the founder of a school of zoology (for he has many pupils) of a 

 high order. His enthusiasm is catching, especially when he has a 

 good soil to work upon." Nor do his interests narrow at all with 

 years. "I sat long before the Madonna di San Sisto to-day," he 

 writes from Dresden, " and can feel its beauty." At Madeira, Tener- 

 iffe, the Grand Canary, and Palma, he enlarges his notions by new 

 sub-tropical experiences. But the great scientific and philosophical 

 revolution of the present century burst upon him, after all, half 

 unprepared. He has long ago demolished the Mosaic cosmogony ; 

 he is deeply interested in Bishop Colenso ; he has already strong views 

 as to the antiquity of man ; and yet Mr. Darwin's " Origin of Species " 

 comes across his horizon at last almost like a thunder-clap. The truth 

 is, he was committed to the opposite belief, and he was old for a sud- 

 den revulsion. He accepted the new creed, indeed, slowly and cau- 

 tiously, but he had a struggle for it, and it cost him hard. 



Lyell's attitude toward the grand theory of the origin of species 

 by descent with modification was, indeed, in many ways a singular 

 one ; and these letters throw much light upon the evolution of his 

 ideas with regard to it. Though his own views as to uniformitarian- 

 ism and the antiquity of man might seem naturally to lead toward the 

 acceptance of the development hypothesis for it is much more diffi- 

 cult to imagine creation taking place in the midst of an ordinary phys- 

 ical series of events than to imagine it taking place in order to restock 

 a world desolated by a divinely ordered cataclysm he formally re- 

 jected the theory as broached by Lamarck, and he hesitated for some 

 time to accept it as altered and amended by Darwin. Indeed, to the 

 last he was but a lukewarm convert. Unless my memory misleads 

 me, I have heard Mr. Herbert Spencer say that the true test whether 

 a man was an evolutionist in fiber or not was to be found in the ques- 

 tion whether he accepted evolution before Mr. Darwin had made its 

 modus operandi intelligible. There are men who rejected the doc- 

 trine of special creation on evidence adduced ; and there are men who 

 never for a moment even entertained it as conceivable. These latter 

 may not always have seen the 7rc5c of evolution, but they always saw 

 the on. Judged by such a standard, Lyell occupies a middle position. 

 From his earliest days he seems to have hankered after some such 

 naturalistic explanation of life, and yet to have feared cordially to 

 accept it. In 1827 Mantell sent him Lamarck, when he was on circuit 

 at Dorchester. He writes back shortly after : 



I devoured Lamarck en voyage, as you did Sismondi, and with equal pleas- 

 ure. His theories delighted me more than any novel I ever read, and much in 

 the same way, for they addressed themselves to the imagination, at least of geolo- 

 gists, who know the mighty inferences which would be deducible were they 

 established by observations. But, thougli I admire even his flights, and feel 

 none of the odium theologicum which some modern writers in this country have 

 visited him with, I confess I read him rather as I hear an advocate on the wrong 



