WHAT LED TO THE SUCCESS. 189 



larks ! But that is the extraordinary thing : Once any 

 bit of metal passes with Bobus as a coin, then any script 

 upon it, and the more inarticulate it is, can only reel in 

 his stricken eyesight as a talisman, only all the less to 

 be questioned, only all the more to be accepted ! l 



As for Lyell, the case is complete, I think, in what 

 has been already said. It was only in expectation, or 

 again, most miserably in vacillation, that he was ever 

 a Darwinian. He listened to me, says Mr. Darwin (i. 87), 

 but he never seemed to agree. Then (ii. 371) to 

 Professor Gray this peculiar and significant sentence so 

 late as llth May 1863: "You speak of Lyell as a 

 judge; now what I complain of is that he declines to 

 be a judge ... I have sometimes almost wished that 

 Lyell had pronounced against me, and when I say ' me,' 

 I only mean change of species by descent." To Mr. 

 Darwin himself, then, Sir Charles Lyell was not, or had 

 ceased to be, even an evolutionist. And so one cannot 

 but think again of Aberdeen, and of the extraordinary 

 preluding puff to Darwinianism there. Now, was that 

 well ? Was it well for Sir Charles Lyell to give the whole 

 force of his all-powerful shoulder to what as yet was 

 no more than a may-be to his own self ? Materialism 

 has had an enormous advance since Darwin : from him 

 on, my brethren, the doctors, have had it all their own 

 way, much to an improved knowledge shall we say of 

 skates? That may be important; but looking to the 

 whole business concerned, can we avoid asking, Was 

 Lyell at all warranted by anything he knew to take upon 

 him the responsibility of such a questionable result as all 

 but victory to materialism ? Why, too, should lie have 

 led the public to believe that the " flood of light " thrown 

 on this "mysterious subject" was all due to "twenty 



1 " It has some high meaning we do not understand ! "Children of 

 tlw Ghetto, vol. iii. p. 41. 



