i859 PUBLICATION OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES i%\ 



the Principles of Geology; and when I consider that this re- 

 markable book had been nearly thirty years in everybody's hands, 

 and that it brings home to any reader of ordinary intelligence 

 a great principle and a great fact, — the principle that the past 

 must be explained by the present, unless good cause be shown 

 to the contrary ; and the fact that so far as our knowledge of 

 the past history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be 

 shown, — I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for my- 

 self, was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For 

 consistent uniformitarianism postulates Evolution as much in 

 the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a new 

 species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly 

 greater " catastrophe " than any of those which Lyell success- 

 fully eliminated from sober geological speculation. 



Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that my own 

 position of critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and 

 must have been taken up, on the same grounds, by many other 

 persons. If Agassiz told me that the forms of life which have 

 successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of succes- 

 sive thoughts of the Deity, and that He had wiped out one set 

 of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe 

 as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself 

 rot only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from 

 the facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypoth- 

 esis was founded, but I had to confess my want of any means 

 of testing the correctness of his explanation of them. And 

 besides that, I could by no means see what the explanation ex- 

 plained. Neither did it help me to be told by an eminent 

 anatomist that species had succeeded one another in time, in 

 virtue of " a continuously operative creational law." That 

 seemed to me to be no more than saying that species had succeed- 

 ed one another in the form of a vote-catching resolution, with 

 " law " to catch the man of science, and " creational " to draw 

 the orthodox. So I took refuge in that " thatige Skepsis " which 

 Goethe has so well defined ; and, reversing the apostolic precept 

 to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of 

 the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmuta- 

 tionist; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among 

 the orthodox — thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, 

 but quite undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness. 



I remember, in the course of my first interview with Mr. 

 Darwin, expressing my belief in the sharpness of the lines of 

 demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of 



