172 DARWINIANISM. 



The way being so conspicuously prepared for it, and 

 its appearance ushered in and heralded by a trumpet- 



1860 ; but he does not let it take hold of him, he immediately 

 passes it : " By the way, it is a great blow to me that you cannot 

 admit the potency of natural selection : the more I think of it, the 

 less I doubt it." Just five months later, however, there is this 

 evidently much more decided start : " I grieve to see you hint at 

 the creation 'of distinct successive types, as well as of a certain 

 number of distinct aboriginal types.' Kemember, if you admit 

 this you cut my throat ; and your own throat ; and I believe will 

 live to be sorry for it." Between this September 12th, 1860, and 

 March 6th, 1863, the correspondence is continued by only some ten 

 letters. They are mostly at long intervals, as well as shorter, at 

 the same time that their contents are less bright, and have more 

 the character of intentional propos in support of what is gloomily 

 feared to be doubted or denied. 



The great burst, however, comes with the publication of the 

 Antiquity of Man: it is now in the four letters between pp. 

 7 and 20 of vol. iii. that we have the disappointment and dis- 

 gust of Mr. Darwin undisguised. Sixty-nine letters in twenty- 

 five years precede these four letters of March- April 1863, and 

 only seven follow them in the remaining eleven years of the life of 

 their recipient. It is so that the Darwin- Lyell correspondence, in 

 the way that is given us here to see it, is constituted. If Sir Charles 

 Lyell believed in the creation of organised types not only at first, 

 but from time to time afterwards, any evolution that could possibly 

 remain to him would only be for the contempt and derision of a 

 Darwin. Whatever, then, were his expectations at first, and what- 

 ever his vacillations in the middle, it is impossible to deny to Sir 

 Charles Lyell a certain adherence to a creation of some sort in the 

 end. In fact, what we have seen quoted from him by Mr. Darwin 

 amounts, out and out, to no less than a creation wholesale. What 

 he would leave for any process of natural variation and natural 

 selection, with an aboriginal creation, followed, too, by a continued 

 creation successively in time, is but the pretence of a compliment 

 in the air. Mr. Huxley (ii. 190, 192), in his chapter "On the 

 Reception," etc., would implicate evolution in the very teaching of 

 Lyell ; but to admit, as he does, that " to the end of his life he 

 (Lyell) entertained a profound antipathy for the pithecoid origin of 

 man," is, with every proof of vacillation and oscillation, to abandon 

 Lyell to creation at last. 



