THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 



547 



could have avoided the inevitable corollary of the pithecoid 

 origin of man — for which, to the end of his life, he enter 

 tained a profound antipathy — he would have advocated the 

 efficiency of causes now in operation to bring about the con- 

 dition of the organic world, as stoutly as he championed that 

 doctrine in reference to inorganic nature. 



The fact is, that a discerning eye might have seen that 

 some form or other of the doctrine of transmutation was inevi- 

 table, from the time when the truth enunciated by William 

 Smith that successive strata are characterised by different 

 kinds of fossil remains, became a firmly established law of 

 nature. No one has set forth the speculative consequences 

 of this generalisation better than the historian of the ' Induc- 

 tive Sciences ' : — 



" But the study of geology opens to us the spectacle of 

 many groups of species which have, in the course of the earth's 

 history, succeeded each other at vast intervals of time ; one 

 set of animals and plants disappearing, as it would seem, ' 

 from the face of our planet, and others, which did not before 



his arguments at first made on my mind, all the gi'eater because Constant 

 Prevost, a pupil of Cuvier's forty years ago, told me his conviction ' that | «^_ 

 Cuvier thought species not real, but that science could not advance with- 

 out assuming that they were so.' " 



To Hooker, March g, 1863 (vol. ii. p. 361,), in reference to Darwin's 

 feelhig about the ' Antiquity of Man.' 



" He [Darwin] seems much disappointed that I do not go farther with 

 him, or do not speak out more. I can only say that I have spoken out to 

 the full extent of my present convictions, and even beyond my state of I 

 feeling as to man's unbroken descent from the brutes, and I find I am I 

 half converting not a few who were in arms against Darwin, and are even 1 

 now against Huxley." Pie speaks of having had to abandon " old and I 

 long cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theoretical ' 

 part of the science in my earlier day, when I believed with Pascal in the j, 

 theory, as Hallam terms it, of * the arch-angel ruined." " 



See the same sentiment in the letter to Darwin, March ii, 1863, 



?• 363 :— 



" I think the old ' creation ' is almost as much required as ever, but of 

 course it takes a new form if Lamarck's views imprqved by yours are ; 

 adopted." 



