SIB CHARLES LYELL. 605 



side, to know what can be made of the case in good hands. I am glad he has 

 been courageous enough, and logical enough, to admit that his argument, if 

 pushed as far as it must go, would prove that men may have come from the 

 orang-outang. But, after all, what changes species may really undergo ! How 

 impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line beyond which some of 

 the so-called extinct species have never passed into recent ones! 



The last two sentences show how, even then, Lyell was trembling 

 upon the brink of the truth. He had got in the thin end of the 

 wedge ; he was prepared to admit the first infinitesimal in the long 

 series whose sum makes up at last the difference between himself and 

 the amoeba : and yet he refused to go any further. 



Time after time, for many years, we find the same thing cropping 

 up again. The question is always before him, though he wavers much 

 in the way he regards it. It seems to fascinate him and draw him on ; 

 even when he is fighting against it, it appeals to him as the natural 

 complement of his other beliefs. In 1830 he writes to his sister from 

 Paris : 



This morning all my Etna shells were examined; out of sixty-three only 

 three species not known to inhabit the Mediterranean, yet the whole volcano 

 nearly is subsequent to them, and rests on them. They lived, on a moderate 

 computation, one hundred thousand years ago, and, after so many generations, 

 are quite unchanged in form. It must, therefore, have required a good time for 

 orang-outangs to become men on Lamarckian principles. 



Any one can see the falsity of this reasoning, which would imply 

 an absolute uniformity in the rate of change in nature everywhere. A 

 little later, in 1836, he writes to Sir John Herschel : 



In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you 

 think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention of inter- 

 mediate causes. . . . An insect may be made in one of its transformations to 

 resemble a dead stick, or a leaf, or a lichen, or a stone, so as to be somewhat less 

 easily found by its enemies ; or, if this would make it too strong, an occasional 

 variety of the species may have this advantage conferred on it ; or, if this would 

 be still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash 

 of color on the wing or body of which the choice would be quite arbitrary, or 

 which might not affect its duration for thousands of years. 



In some ways this is marvelously near Darwin ; but in others it 

 differs toto coelo ; for Lyell does not see that these variations could 

 arise " spontaneously," that is to say, in the ordinary course of small 

 differences of antenatal conditions ; he sets them all down directly to 

 " the Presiding Mind." Nor does he see that they might result at last 

 in the production of new species. Indeed, the context, which I have 

 suppressed, takes off much from the superficial air of anticipating 

 Darwin, which the passage nakedly quoted undoubtedly bears. A 

 year later he tells his sister 



The latest news is that two fossil monkeys have at last been found one in 

 India, contemporary with extinct quadrupeds, but not very ancient, Pliocene, 



