THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS 119 



upon the new pabulum so generously dealt out to them 

 by the new evolutionism. 



Among scientific minds of the first order, Lyeli 

 alone in England, heavily weighted by theological pre- 

 conceptions, for awhile hung back. All his life long, 

 as his letters show us, the great geologist had felt the 

 powerful spell of the Lamarckian hypothesis continually 

 enticing him with its seductive charm. He had fought 

 against it blindly, in the passionate endeavour to pre- 

 serve what he thought his higher faith in the separate 

 and divine creation of man ; but ever and anon he 

 returned anew to the biological Circe with a fresh fasci- 

 nation, as the moth returns to the beautiful flame that 

 has scorched and singed it. In a well-known passage 

 in the earlier editions of his ' Principles of Geology,' 

 the father of uniformitarianism gives at length his own 

 reasons for dissenting from the doctrine of evolution as 

 then set forth ; and even after Darwin's discovery had 

 supplied him with a new clue, a vera causa, a sufficient 

 power for the modification of species into fresh forms, 

 theological difficulties made him cling still as long as 

 possible to the old theory of the origin of man which 

 he loved to describe as that of the ' archangel ruined.' 

 He was loth to exchange this cherished belief for the 

 degrading alternative (as it approved itself to him) of 

 the ape elevated. But in the end, with the fearless 

 honesty of a searcher after truth, he gave way slowly 

 and regretfully. Always looking back with something 

 like remorse to the flesh-pots of the ecclesiastical Egypt, 

 with its enticing visions of fallen grandeur, the great 

 thinker whose uniformitarian theory of geology had 

 more than aught else paVed the way for the gradual 



