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The Presidential Address. 
out how completely the facts of Palaeontology accord with 
this view. But although it is thus permissible to speak of 
the Darwinian theory as a theory of evolution, it must not he 
forgotten that evolution is not necessarily Darwinism. It is 
the more necessary to remember this in order to fully realise 
the vast change in thought wrought by Darwin. Long before 
the appearance of the ‘ Origin of Species ’ there had been 
evolutionists. In 1809 Jean Lamarck published his ‘ Philo¬ 
sophic Zoologique’; in 1828 Geoffroy St. Hilare declared his 
belief in evolution ; the author of the ‘ Vestiges of Creation ’ 
(1844) was an evolutionist; many others, and among them 
Goethe, the Shakespeare of German literature, had expressed 
the doctrine of evolution before Darwin ; but it was our own 
great countryman who convinced the world of its truth. The 
bare facts of morphology, of classification, and of geological 
succession, are suggestive of evolution, but it required a 
Darwin to point out how evolution had taken place in 
organic nature. 
The causes of transmutation of species assigned by the 
older evolutionists were in fact inadequate. For Lamarck 
these causes were mainly habit and the direct action of 
external conditions; the author of the ‘Vestiges’ found the 
causes of evolution in “ impulses” implanted in living beings, 
tending to adapt them to their surroundings, and causing 
them to rise in the scale of organisation. It was reserved 
for Darwin to clothe the skeleton hypothesis of evolution 
with the flesh and blood that converted it into a living theory. 
To my mind, no more convincing proof of the force of 
Darwin’s reasoning is to be found than in the conversion of 
Sir Charles Lyell, for the whole spirit of this great geologist’s 
teaching was in every essential evolutionary ; and yet he had 
rejected the Lamarckian hypothesis in the early editions of 
his ‘Principles,’ wherein he had advanced long and elaborate 
arguments showing the insufficiency of the French natu¬ 
ralist’s theory. But in the thirteen years’ interval that 
elapsed between the publication of the ninth and tenth 
editions of the ‘ Principles of Geology,’ the author’s opinions 
on this question had undergone a change ; and in the latter 
