The Reception of the Origin of Species | Page 8

change of

conditions--was, on the face of it, inapplicable to the whole vegetable
world. I do not think that any impartial judge who reads the
'Philosophie Zoologique' now, and who afterwards takes up Lyell's
trenchant and effectual criticism (published as far back as 1830), will
be disposed to allot to Lamarck a much higher place in the
establishment of biological evolution than that which Bacon assigns to
himself in relation to physical science generally,--buccinator tantum.
(Erasmus Darwin first promulgated Lamarck's fundamental
conceptions, and, with greater logical consistency, he had applied them
to plants. But the advocates of his claims have failed to show that he, in
any respect, anticipated the central idea of the 'Origin of Species.')
But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put
as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as in the venerable
traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps
more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious conviction
that Evolution, after all, would turn out true. I have recently read afresh
the first edition of the 'Principles of Geology'; and when I consider that
this remarkable 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 (The same principle and the same
fact guide the result from all sound historical investigation. Grote's
'History of Greece' is a product of the same intellectual movement as
Lyell's 'Principles.')--I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for
myself, was the chief agent for 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 successfully eliminated from sober geological
speculation.
In fact, no one was better aware of this than Lyell himself. (Lyell, with
perfect right, claims this position for himself. He speaks of having
"advocated a law of continuity even in the organic world, so far as
possible without adopting Lamarck's theory of transmutation"...
"But while I taught that as often as certain forms of animals and plants

disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place
by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it
remained for Darwin to accumulate proof that there is no break
between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work
of evolution, and not of special creation...
"I had certainly prepared the way in this country, in six editions of my
work before the 'Vestiges of Creation' appeared in 1842 [1844], for the
reception of Darwin's gradual and insensible evolution of
species."--'Life and Letters,' Letter to Haeckel, volume ii. page 436.
November 23, 1868.) If one reads any of the earlier editions of the
'Principles' carefully (especially by the light of the interesting series of
letters recently published by Sir Charles Lyell's biographer), it is easy
to see that, with all his energetic opposition to Lamarck, on the one
hand, and to the ideal quasi-progressionism of Agassiz, on the other,
Lyell, in his own mind, was strongly disposed to account for the
origination of all past and present species of living things by natural
causes. But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of
creation for a natural process which he imagined to be
incomprehensible.
In a letter addressed to Mantell (dated March 2, 1827), Lyell speaks of
having just read Lamarck; he expresses his delight at Lamarck's
theories, and his personal freedom from any objection based on
theological grounds. And though he is evidently alarmed at the
pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine, he observes:--
"But, after all, what changes species may really undergo! How
impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line, beyond which
some of the so-called extinct species have never passed into recent
ones."
Again, the following remarkable passage occurs in the postscript of a
letter addressed to Sir John Herschel in 1836:--
"In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that
you think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention
of intermediate causes. I left this rather to be inferred, not thinking it
worth while to offend a certain class of persons by embodying in words
what would only be a speculation." (In the same sense, see the letter to
Whewell, March