SIB CHARLES LYELL. 607 



vivendl which had to be tinkered anew at every fresh discovery. To 

 the very last his acceptance of evolution was but half-hearted ; he 

 never came out and gave it the right hand of friendship fearlessly ; he 

 was always making reservations and starting difficulties, although his 

 own beliefs fell short of it in places only by an infinitesimal fraction. 

 " No miracle and no catastrophes in the cosmical system," he seems to 

 say from time to time ; " no miracle in the evolution of our planet ; no 

 fresh creations en bloc to repeople a desolate world ; but just a very 

 tiny miracle now and then, somewhere behind the scenes a single new 

 species to be created at a time, very unobtrusively, in Australia per- 

 haps or St. Helena that is all I ask." Whereas a thoroughly logical 

 mind, a mind of the very highest order, would have said even before 

 Darwin : " Creation can have no possible place in the physical series of 

 things at all. How organisms came to be, I do not yet exactly see ; 

 but I am sure they must have come to be by some merely physical 

 process, if we could only find it out." And such a mind could not fail 

 to jump at the Darwinian solution the moment it was once fairly pre- 

 sented to it. 



At the same time it would be unjust to deny that Lyell possessed 

 and retained throughout life an unusual plasticity of thought and 

 modifiability of opinion. It was no small thing that long after his 

 sixtieth year he should have had the courage formally to recant in 

 print the condemnation of " transf ormism " in his earlier works, and 

 to accept, however unwillingly, the theory that he had so often and so 

 deliberately rejected.* 



A somewhat ungenerous critic has lately declared that Lyell often 

 shut his eyes when brought face to face with evidence adverse to his 

 own views. These letters abound in proofs to the contrary. Twenty 

 years before the publication of the " Origin of Species," he writes on 

 another subject to Sir John Herschel : 



I am very full of Darwin's new theory of coral islands, and have urged 

 "Whewell to make him read it at our next meeting. I must give up my volcanic 

 crater theory for ever, though it costs me a pang at first, for it accounted for so 

 much the annular form, the central lagoon, the sudden rising of an isolated 

 mountain in a deep sea, all went so well with the notion of submerged, crateri- 

 form, and conical volcanoes, of the shape of South Shetland, and with an open- 

 ing into which a ship could sail. . . . Yet, spite of all this, the whole theory is 

 knocked on the head, and the annular shape and central lagoon have nothing to 

 do with volcanoes, nor even with a crateriform bottom. 



The same spirit comes out in many other places. " I am sure I 

 have no objection" he says in one place about some disputed Old Red 



* It is curious to note, however, that he never seems quite fully to have realized the 

 immense difference between Mr. Darwin's view and Lamarck's. A priori, creation is 

 from the first unbelievable ; but, as a matter of evidence, Lamarck failed to make evolu- 

 tion comprehensible, while Mr. Darwin succeeded in doing so. Hence he was able to 

 convert many who, like Lyell, were hanging back and waiting for a posteriori proofs. 

 Yet Lyell himself never wholly recognized the difference. 



