i2o CHARLES DARWIN 



acceptance of Darwin's evolutionism, came out at last 

 from the house of bondage, and nobly ranged himself 

 on the side of what his intellect judged to be the truth 

 of riature, though his emotions urged him hard to blind 

 his judgment and to neglect its lights for an emotional 

 figment. Science has no more pathetic figure than 

 that of the old philosopher, in his sixty-sixth year, 

 throwing himself with all the eag< r.iess of youth into 

 what he had long considered the wrong scale, and 

 vigorously wrecking in the ' Antiquity of Man ' what 

 seemed to the dimmed vision of his own emotional 

 nature the very foundations of his beloved creed. But 

 still he did it. He came out and was separate. In his 

 own idiomatic language, lie found at last that ' we must 

 go the whole ourang ; ' and, deep as was the pang that 

 the recantation cost him, he formally retracted the con- 

 demnation of ' transformism ' in his earlier works, and 

 accepted, however unwillingly, the theory he had so 

 often and so deliberately rejected. 



The c Antiquity of Man ' came out in February 

 1863, some three years after the ' Origin of Species.' 

 For some time speculation had been active over the 

 strange hatchets which Boucher de Perthes had recently 

 unearthed among the Abbeville drift shapeless masses 

 of chipped flint rudely fashioned into the form of an axe, 

 which we now call palaeolithic implements, and know to 

 be the handicraft of preglacial men. But until Lyell's 

 authoritative work appeared the unscientific public could 

 not tell exactly what to think of these curious and almost 

 unhuman-looking objects. Lyell at once set all doubts 

 at rest; the magic of his name silenced the derisive 

 whispers of the dissidents. Already, in the previous year, 



