270 A. H. Hunt — A Vindication of Bacon, Huxley, and others. 



On this passage tJie charge of sinning against the light is founded. 

 Now it is a matter of no sort of importance whether Lyell was right 

 or wrong, but it is a matter of grave importance to his reputation 

 whether he either weakly deceived himself or wickedly deceived 

 other people. 



Sinning against the light was certainly not the character of 

 Sir Charles Lyell, as is well shown by his prompt renunciation 

 of his old principles in favour of Darwinism and the antiquity of 

 Man. Pengelly writes in September, 1862 : " In his new book he 

 £Lyell] says he is ' going the whole hog ' both in the antiquity of 

 man, and Darwinism, and if any man deserved excommunication 

 he thinks he certainly will" (Life of W. Pengelly, p. 135). 



It is always lawful for a man to defend his position until it is 

 proved untenable ; and the question is, whether the doctrine of the 

 stability of the solar system and the maintenance of the sun's heat 

 was so thoroughly disproved as to make its continued acceptance 

 scarcely honest. 



It is worth noticing that in a very popular book, " The Orbs of 

 Heaven," 1859, by 0. M. Mitchell, Director of the Cincinnati 

 Observatory, the following passage occurs : " I see the mighty 

 orbits of the planets slowly rocking to and fro, their figures 

 expanding and contracting, their axes revolving in their vast periods ; 

 but stability is thei'e. Every change shall wear away, and after 

 sweeping through the grand cycle of cycles, the whole system 

 shall return to its primitive condition of perfection and beauty " 

 (loc. cit., p. 125). 



Lyell died in 1875. In 1882, seven years later, C. W. Siemens, 

 President of the British Association, an electrical expert, propounded 

 the very selfsame electrical self-winding clock theory ; for which 

 Lyell has been so severely blamed, not for propounding, but for 

 merely suggesting. 



Siemens writes as follows : " In March last I ventured to bring 

 before the Koyal Society a speculation regarding the conservation of 

 solar energy," which he proceeds to briefly state, and subsequently 

 proceeds : " If chemical action and reaction can further be admitted, 

 we may be able to trace certain conditions of thermal dependence 

 and maintenance, in which we may recognize principles of high 

 perfection, applicable also to comparatively humble purposes of 

 human life " (Siemens, Eep. B.A. Southampton, p. 33). These 

 theories may or may not be sound, but they were boldly announced 

 from the Chair of the British Association as well as defended before 

 the Eoyal Society. 



And yet again, twenty years later, in 1902, from the most 

 fashionable scientific rostrum in London, that of the Eoyal Institution, 

 we hear Mr. Wells saying : " Some day this earth of ours, tideless 

 and slow moving, will be dead and frozen, and all that has lived 

 upon it will be frozen out and done with. There surely man 

 must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently 

 convincing. And yet one doesn't believe it. At least I do not. 

 And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe 



