750 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



And again in The Princess : 



This world was once a fluid haze of light, 



Till toward the centre set the starry tides, 



And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast 



The planets : then the monster, then the man ; 



Tattoo'd or woaded, winter-clad in skins, 



Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate ; 



As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here 



Among the lowest. 



This evolutionary faith runs all through Tennyson's works ; 

 In Memoriam is permeated with it. In one part of this poem 

 he speaks of the succession of types in Nature and speaks of 

 a gradual development from age to age, man being but an 

 intermediate link in the chain of progress to higher and higher 

 types : 



Star and system rolling past, 

 A soul shall draw from out the vast 

 And strike his being into bounds, 



And, moved thro' life of lower phase, 



Result in man, be born and think, 



And act and love, a closer link 

 Betwixt us and the crowning race 



*& 



Of those that, eye to eye, shall look 

 On knowledge ; under whose command 

 Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand' 



Is Nature like an open book ; 



No longer half-akin to brute, 

 For all we thought and loved and did, 

 And hoped and suffered is but seed 



Of what in them is flower and fruit. 



It is significant that though this was written before the 

 Origin of Species was published, the ideas expressed are 

 practically identical with those in Prof. Ray Lankester's Romanes 

 Lecture on " Nature and Man " — the latest word that science 

 has yet said on man's position in the Universe. After the 

 appearance of the Origin Tennyson's grasp of the principle of 

 Evolution became much firmer. Henceforth two main points 

 in the theory seem to have struck him with special force. One 

 was the slowness of the change combined with the fact that 

 though slow there seems to be no logical limit to its power; 



