io8 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



Lamarck, poor, neglected, and blind in his old age, 

 died in 1829. Both Cuvier, who ridiculed him, and 

 Goethe, who never heard of him, passed away three 

 years later. The year following his death, when 

 Darwin was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Lyell 

 published his Principles of Geology ', a work destined 

 to assist in paving the way for the removal of one 

 difficulty attending the solution of the theory of the 

 origin of species, namely, the vast period of time for 

 the life -history of the globe which that theory 

 demands. As Lyell, however, was then a believer 

 although, like a few others of his time, of 

 wavering type in the fixity of species, he had 

 other aims in view than those to which his book 

 contributed. But he wrote with an open mind, not 

 being, as Herbert Spencer says of Hugh Miller, * a 

 theologian studying geology.' Following the theories 

 of uniformity of action laid down by Hutton, by 

 Buffon, and by that industrious surveyor, William 

 Smith, who travelled the length and breadth of Eng- 

 land, mapping out the sequence of the rocks, and 

 tabulating the fossils special to each stratum, Lyell 

 demonstrated in detail that the formations and features 

 of the earth's crust are explained by the operation 

 of causes still active. He was one among others, 

 each working independently at different branches of 

 research; each, unwittingly, collecting evidence which 

 would help to demolish old ideas, and support new 

 theories. 



A year after the Principles of Geology appeared, 

 there crept unnoticed into the world a treatise, 

 by one Patrick Matthew, on Naval Timber and 

 Arboriculture -, under which unexciting title Darwin's 



