606 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



perhaps ; another in the south of France, Miocene and contemporary with Paleo- 

 theriuin. So that, according to Lamarck's view, there may have been a great 

 many thousand centuries for their tails to wear off, and the transformation to 

 men to take place. 



In 1854 he notes, after an evening at Mr. Darwin's, how Sir Joseph 

 Hooker astonished him with an account of that strange orchid, Cata- 

 setum, which bears three totally distinct kinds of flower. " It will 

 figure," he says, "in C. Darwin's book on species, with many other 

 ' ugly facts,' as Hooker, clinging like me to the orthodox faith, calls 

 these and other abnormal vagaries." 



Two years later, speaking of the wingless beetles of Madeira, he 

 asks, " Was it not foreseen that wings would only cause them to be 

 blown out to sea and be drowned ? " 



Soon after, meeting " Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston at Darwin's," 

 he is constrained to ask, " After all, did we not come from an orang ? " 

 At last the " Origin of Species " comes out, and bit by bit Lyell is 

 compelled to give in. Even then he can reconcile himself but slowly 

 to the new creed. " I plead guilty," he writes to Sir Joseph Hooker, 

 " to going further in my reasoning toward transmutation than in my 

 sentiments and imagination, and perhaps for that very reason I shall 

 lead more people on to Darwin and you than one who, being born 

 later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to abandon of old and 

 long-cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theo- 

 retical part of the science in my earlier days, when I believed with 

 Pascal in the theory, as Hallam terms it, of ' the archangel ruined.' " 

 To Mr. Darwin himself he writes that " the descent of man from the 

 brutes takes away much of the charm from my speculations on the 

 past relating to such matters." In the end he comes to the conclusion, 

 as he idiomatically puts it, that " we must go the whole orang " ; for 

 that old mode of envisaging the facts clings to him to the last. Finally, 

 he writes : " The question of the origin of species gave me much to 

 think of, and you may well believe that it cost me a struggle to re- 

 nounce my old creed. One of Darwin's reviewers put the alternative 

 strongly by asking whether we are to believe that man is modified mud 

 or modified monkey." 



I have illustrated this matter thus fully because it is one which 

 very clearly shows the weak side of Lyell's intellect. With all his 

 breadth of mind and freedom from prejudice, he was not ever one of 

 those who really get to the very deepest bottom of things. His ten- 

 dencies were all in the right direction, and his instinct inclined him 

 always to the true solution ; but he did not build himself up a set of 

 first principles to start with, firmly based upon a philosophical founda- 

 tion, and make these the fixed criteria of his judgments throughout. 

 His was too English a mind for that. He clung to all old beliefs as 

 long as possible ; he parleyed and temporized with the enemy ; he was 

 for effecting a compromise wherever he could, a patched-up modus 



