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Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell's Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Michael Bartholomew
Michael Bartholomew
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster.
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Abstract

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Type
Presidential Address
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , June 1973 , pp. 261 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1973

References

1 Darwin, F. (ed.), The life and letters of Charles Darwin (2nd edn., 3 vols., London, 1887), ii. 193.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as LLD.

2 Cannon, W. F., ‘The uniformitarian-catastrophist debate’, Isis, li (1960), 38–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The bases of Darwin's achievement: a revaluation’, Victorian studies, v (1961), 109–34Google Scholar; ‘The impact of uniformitarianism: two letters from John Herschel to Charles Lyell’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cv (1961), 301–14Google Scholar; ‘Charles Lyell is permitted to speak for himself: an abstract’, in Schneer, C. J. (ed.), Toward a history of geology (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

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3 Lyell, C., Principles of geology (3 vols., London, 1830–1833)Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as PG.

4 Hooykaas, 1966, op. cit. (2), 7.Google Scholar

5 Eiseley, L., Darwin's century (London, 1959), pp. 97–115Google Scholar; ‘Charles Lyell’, Scientific American, cci (1959), 98–106.Google ScholarEllegård, A., Darwin and the general reader (Göteborg, 1958), pp. 289–91.Google ScholarGreene, J. C., The death of Adam (Iowa, 1959), pp. 249–57Google Scholar; ‘The Kuhnian paradigm and the Darwinian revolution’, in Roller, , op. cit. (2), pp. 1–23 (18–19)Google Scholar. Gillispie, C. C., Genesis and geology (1951; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), pp. 131–3.Google ScholarHodge, M. J. S., ‘On the origins of Darwinism in Lyellian historical geography’Google Scholar, a paper read to the British Society for the History of Science, 10 July 1971. Irvine, W., Apes, angels and Victorians (Meridian paperback edn., New York, 1959), pp. 47–9, 74–5, 86–7.Google ScholarLovejoy, A. O., ‘The argument for organic evolution before the Origin of species’, in Glass, B., Temkin, O., and Strauss, W. (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 356–414 (366–73)Google Scholar. McKinney, H. L., ‘A. R. Wallace and the discovery of natural selection’, Journal of the history of medicine, xxi (1966), 333–57Google Scholar; Wallace and natural selection (New Haven and London, 1972)Google Scholar. McKinney gives a full discussion of Lyell's thinking on evolution and, in particular, examines Lyell's response to Wallace's 1855 paper ‘On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species’.

6 For example, Wallace, Sedgwick, Hooker, Spencer, and Darwin himself. See notes 63–5.

7 Gillispie, 1959, op. cit. (5), p. 131.Google Scholar Cf. Huxley, , in LLD, ii. 190.Google Scholar

8 Hodge, , op. cit. (5)Google Scholar. McKinney, 1966 and 1972, op. cit. (5).Google Scholar

9 Hodge, , op. cit. (5), typescript p. 9.Google Scholar

10 Eiseley, , Darwin's century, pp. 108–15Google Scholar; ‘Charles Lyell’, op. cit. (5), 101–2.Google ScholarGillispie, , op. cit. (5), 131.Google Scholar

11 As Cannon, Hooykaas, and Rudwick have made plain, we should be wary of accepting Lyell's own estimate of his scientific opponents. Lyell tended to make his ‘paroxysmalist’, ‘convulsionist’, or ‘cosmogonist’ opponents, as he scathingly called them, into straw men in order to score easy victories. But Cannon, Hooykaas, and Rudwick have demonstrated that Lyell's predecessors and contemporaries were substantial geologists in their own right, with a coherent and fruitful methodology at their service. They rarely deserved Lyell's scorn. See Cannon 1960, op. cit. (2); Hooykaas, R., Catastrophism in geology (Amsterdam, 1970)Google Scholar; Rudwick, 1971, op. cit. (2).Google Scholar

12 Eiseley, , Darwin's century, p. 105.Google ScholarColeman, W., ‘Lyell and the reality of species’, Isis, liii (1962), 325–38 (326)Google Scholar. Irvine, , op. cit. (5), 139, 142–8, 210–11.Google ScholarWilson, , Species journals, op. cit. (2), pp. xxviGoogle Scholar, I. M. J. S. Hodge, review of Wilson, , Species journals, in Isis, lxii (1971), 119–20.Google ScholarMcKinney, 1966, op. cit. (5), 351Google Scholar; McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), pp. 97–116.Google Scholar

13 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 21.

14 Lyell, to Mantell, G., 2 03 1827Google Scholar, in Lyell, K. (ed.), Life, letters and journals of Sir Charles Lyell (2 vols., London, 1881), 168–9.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as LLJ. Dr Hodge has recently argued that Lamarck was not proposing a theory of ‘common descent’ at all. But for the purposes of my argument here, what Lyell thought Lamarck said is more important than what Lamarck actually said. It is clear that Lyell understood Lamarck to have been formulating a theory of species origination, and Lyell was not wrong in seeing that Lamarck's account allowed no special place for man. See Hodge, M. J. S., ‘Lamarck's science of living bodies’, British journal for the history of science, v (1971), 323–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 It is significant that it was Wallace's 1855 paper ‘On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species’, Annals and magazine of natural history, 2nd ser., xvi (1855), 184–97Google Scholar, that prompted Lyell to open a notebook on the species question. Wallace's conclusion, which assumed the general truth of organic progression, was that ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species’ (p. 196; Wallace's italics). Wallace's paper assumes that evolution has happened, although it does not provide a mechanism. In 1868 Lyell wrote to Wallace, outlining his own version of the history of evolutionary thought during the preceding thirty years. In this letter Lyell wrote: ‘When I first read your paper declaring that each new species had come into the world co-incident in time & space with closely, allied species, it struck me as true though not capable of geological demonstration, and it shook my confidence together with other arguments in the same paper in the independent creation theory more than anything I have read before’; copy of a letter dated 19 November 1868, in Lyell papers, University of Edinburgh Library; my italics. See Species journals, p. 3Google Scholar, and McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5).Google Scholar

16 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 22.Google Scholar

17 Cf. Cannon, , ‘The bases of Darwin's achievement …’, op. cit. (2), 110.Google Scholar Cannon argues that the progressionist natural theologians were discomfited in 1859 because Darwin had ‘stolen’ their universe and fitted it out with a revolutionary mechanism. In one sense this may be true: the superficial similarity, yet underlying deep antagonism, between the Christian progressionists' account of the history of life and Darwin's goes a long way towards explaining the progressionists' wrath. But for reasons that this article aims to make clear, I believe that Darwin did not derive his ‘framework’ from the progressionist natural theologians, as against the framework of Principles. Lyell's anti-progressionism, for all his ingenuity, turned out to be a negligible obstruction to evolutionary thought; the line from Principles to the Origin is unimpeded.

18 Cannon, 1960, op. cit. (2), 39.Google Scholar

19 Young, R. M., ‘Darwin's metaphor: does Nature select?’, The monist, lv (1971), 442–503 (444).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 33.Google Scholar

21 PG (1st edn., 1833), iii. 384.Google Scholar This statement comes from the ‘Concluding remarks’ in the last volume of Principles, and Lyell retained it throughout all of the eleven editions that he personally supervised. See PG (11th edn., 1872), ii. 620.Google Scholar

22 Lyell, , ‘Address to the Geological Society … 17 February, 1837’, Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, ii (1837), 479–523 (517–21).Google Scholar

23 LLJ, i. 268.Google Scholar

24 LLJ, i. 271.Google Scholar

25 LLJ, i. 310.Google Scholar

26 PG (1st edn., 1833), iii. 271–4.Google Scholar

27 Lyell, to the Bishop of Llandaff, , 28 03 1831Google Scholar, quoted in Wilson, 1972, op. cit. (2), p. 310.Google Scholar In this letter Lyell also affirms that he believes that species originated by ‘the direct intervention of the First Cause’. Professor Wilson comments: ‘one could wish that Lyell had not written this letter’ (p. 310), but the letter only corroborates what we can ascertain from Principles, the Species journals, and other sources. See, for example, the letter to Wallace quoted in note 15.

28 Lyell, to DrFleming, , 1 05 1833Google Scholar, in LLJ, i. 397.Google Scholar

29 See Wilson, 1972, op. cit. (2), pp. 308–23, 353–60, 376Google Scholar; Hearnshaw, F. J. C., The centenary history of King's College, London (London, 1929), pp. 91, 107–9.Google Scholar

30 LLJ, i. 382.Google Scholar

31 Copy of a letter from Lyell, to Carpenter, , 22 01 1866Google Scholar, enclosed in a letter to T. H. Huxley, same date; Huxley papers, 6, 120, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. See also Carpenter, W. B., Nature and man. Essays scientific and philosophical (London, 1888), pp. 86–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 The suggestion is Dr Hodge's.

33 [Lyell, ], ‘Transactions of the Geological Society of London’, Quarterly review, xxxiv (1826), 507–40.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 513.

35 Ibid., 518.

36 Lyell, to Murchison, R. I., 15 01 1829Google Scholar, in LLJ, i. 234.Google Scholar Lyell's emphasis.

37 See, for example, Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 8Google Scholar; Hooykaas, 1966, op. cit. (2), 7Google Scholar; Cannon, 1960, op. cit. (2), 55.Google Scholar

38 Lyell, to Murchison, , 15 01 1829Google Scholar, in LLJ i. 234.Google Scholar

39 Unpublished letter from Lyell to C. Prévost, 20 April 1828; copy in Lyell papers, Edinburgh University Library.

40 LLJ, i. 234.Google Scholar Lyell's emphasis.

41 Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 8.Google Scholar

42 Ibid.

43 Lyell, 1826, op. cit. (33), 513.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 538–9. Lyell's italics.

45 Butler, J., The analogy of religion (1736)Google Scholar, part one, chapters VII and VIII. In the Oxford University Press ‘World's Classics’ edn. (London, 1907), this section is on pp. 144–65.

46 Lyell, 1826, op. cit. (33), 539.Google Scholar

47 Cf. PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 1.Google Scholar The first sentence runs: ‘Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature …’

48 Lyell, to Mantell, G., 2 03 1827Google Scholar, in LLJ, i. 168–9.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., 168.

50 Ibid., 169. In 1827 little was known of the strata below the carboniferous series.

51 Ibid.

52 Lyell, to Darwin, , 15 03 1863Google Scholar, in LLJ, ii. 365.Google Scholar

53 E.g. LLD, iii. 14, 15.Google Scholar See also: Huxley, T. H. to Lyell, , 17 08 1862Google Scholar, in Huxley, L. (ed.), Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols., London, 1900), i. 200Google Scholar; McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), pp. 115–16.Google Scholar

54 In 1814 jaws of what Cuvier identified as marsupial mammals were found in the Secondary Oolite at Stonesfield, near Oxford. See Wilson's introduction to Species journals, pp. xxv–xxvi.Google Scholar

55 Lyell, 1826, op. cit. (33), 529–32.Google Scholar

56 Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 24–5.Google Scholar

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58 Species journals, op. cit. (2), p. 337.Google Scholar Cf. PG (10th edn., 2 vols., 1867–1868)Google Scholar; Lyell there speaks of ‘a theoretical question of surpassing interest with which the palaeontologist has been busily engaged since the time of Lamarck, namely, whether it is conceivable that each fossil fauna and flora brought to light by the geologist may have been connected, by way of descent or generation, with that which immediately preceded it.’ (i. 167). In 1827 Lyell had resolved to show that there was no such connexion.

59 Dr Rudwick has rightly criticized historians who, in searching for Darwin's ‘forerunners’, have misleadingly isolated the section of Lyell's work that deals with the organic world from its context within the overall strategy of the Principles; see Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 5.Google Scholar Nonetheless, having established the sense in which I think Lyell's attitudes towards species were integrated into his overall project, I believe I am justified in concentrating on just one or two aspects of Principles.

60 E.g. [Scrope, G. P.], ‘Principles of geology … vol. i. (1830)’Google Scholar, Quarterly review, xliii (1830), 411–69 (467)Google Scholar. Sedgwick, A., ‘Presidential address to the Geological Society of London …’, Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, i (1831), 281–316 (305–6)Google Scholar. Conybeare, W. D. to Lyell, , 02 1841Google Scholar, in Rudwick, 1967, op. cit. (2), 281–2.Google Scholar

61 ‘Whewell, W.’, ‘Principles of Geology …. vol. ii. (1832)’, Quarterly review, xlvii (1832), 103–32 (117)Google Scholar; Whewell's italics.

62 Wilson, 1971, op. cit. (2), 43.Google Scholar

63 Spencer, H., Autobiography (2 vols., London, 1904), i. 176.Google Scholar

64 For Wallace, see: Darwin-Wallace celebration (London: Linnean Society, 1908), 118Google Scholar, and McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), pp. 32–43, 49–50, 54–9.Google Scholar McKinney gives a detailed account of how Wallace used Lyell's work. For Hooker see Hooker, J. D., ‘Presidential address to the 1868 Norwich British Association meeting’, Report of the 38th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1869), pp. lix–lxxv (lxxi)Google Scholar. For Huxley see LLD, ii. 190–4Google Scholar, and Huxley, T. H. to Lyell, C., 25 06 1859Google Scholar, in Huxley, , op. cit. (53), i. 173–4.Google Scholar Huxley urges Lyell to accept Darwin's forthcoming theory as ‘it is the logical development of Uniformitarianism and that its adoption would harmonise the spirit of Palaeontology with that of Physical Geology’. For Gray see Gray, A., ‘Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology’ (1860), reprinted in Dupree, A. H. (ed.), Darwiniana. By Asa Gray (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 72–145 (84–5, 90)Google Scholar. For Darwin see: Darwin, to Homer, L., 29 08 1844Google Scholar, in Darwin, F. and Seward, A. (eds.), More letters of Charles Darwin (2 vols., London, 1903), ii. 117Google Scholar, hereafter cited as MLD; Darwin, to Lyell, , 6 03 1863Google Scholar, LLD, iii. 12.Google Scholar Darwin says: ‘… I respect you as my old honoured guide and master.’

65 Sedgwick, to DrLivingstone, , 16 03 1865Google Scholar, in Clarke, J. W. and Hughes, T. McK. (eds.), The life and letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick (2 vols., Cambridge, 1890), ii. 411–12.Google Scholar

66 Whewell, 1832, op. cit. (61), 109.Google Scholar

67 E.g. Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 28–9.Google ScholarHooykaas, 1963, op. cit. (2), pp. 28–9, 36–7.Google Scholar

68 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 104.Google Scholar

69 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 105.Google Scholar Dr Rudwick has pointed out that Lyell often misunderstood his opponents' arguments, choosing to see them as far more crude, miracle-laden, and unscientific than they truly were. This tendency is at work here: Lyell attempts to discredit, as ‘cosmogonists’, all those who employed cooling-earth theories in their explanation of geological or climatic change; see Rudwick, 1971, op. cit. (2).Google Scholar

70 Lyell, , Geological evidences of the antiquity of man (London, 1863), p. 470.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Antiquity of man.

71 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 104.Google Scholar

72 Ibid., i. chapters VII–VIII.

73 Ibid., i. 141–3. Lyell's italics.

74 Cannon, 1960, op. cit. (2), 46.Google Scholar

75 PG (10th edn., 1867–1868), i. 143.Google Scholar

76 Rudwick, 1970, op. cit. (2), 33.Google Scholar

77 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 145.Google Scholar

78 Ibid., i. 150.

79 Rudwick, 1967, op. cit. (2), 281–2.Google Scholar

80 Quoted in McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), p. 41.Google Scholar Wallace's italics. Wallace changes Lyell's wording slightly. McKinney's whole discussion of Wallace's commentary on Lyell is of great interest.

81 Rudwick, 1967, op. cit. (2), 282.Google Scholar

82 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 154–5.Google Scholar Cf. PG, ii (1832), 253–71.Google Scholar

83 Scrope, , op. cit. (60), 467.Google Scholar

84 PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 155–65.Google Scholar

85 An analysis of Lyell's discussion of species is given in Coleman, W., ‘Lyell and the reality of species’, Isis, liii (1962), 325–38.Google Scholar

86 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 18.Google Scholar

87 Ibid., ii. 1–21.

88 Ibid., ii. 19.

89 Ibid., ii. 8–9.

90 Ibid., ii. 173–4. Cf. Coleman, , op. cit. (85), 335.Google Scholar

91 See McKinney, 1966, op. cit. (5), 346–7Google Scholar; McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), pp. 37–8.Google Scholar

92 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 22–3.Google Scholar

93 Ibid., ii. 131.

94 See Coleman, , op. cit. (85), 333–4Google Scholar; Greene, 1959, op. cit. (5), pp. 252–3, 313–14.Google Scholar

95 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 159.Google Scholar

96 Ibid., ii. 42.

97 Ibid., ii. 125.

98 Ibid., ii. 136.

99 Ibid., ii. 41.

100 de Beer, G. ‘Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species’, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical series, ii (1959–1963), 3–200 (67).Google Scholar

101 Quoted in McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), p. 38.Google Scholar See also p. 45, where Wallace makes similarly short work of demolishing the notion that small adaptive features in plants and animals prove God's wonderful design.

102 Lovejoy, , op. cit. (5), p. 365.Google Scholar

103 Lyell, to Herschel, , 1 06 1836Google Scholar, in LLJ, i. 464–9.Google Scholar

104 Ibid., i. 467.

105 Lyell occasionally admitted that non-evolutionary species creations must be miraculous. See, for example, Species journals, p. 57Google Scholar; Antiquity of man, p. 421Google Scholar; letter to Wallace, , op. cit. (15).Google Scholar

106 LLD, ii. 194.Google Scholar For a discussion of Whewell and species origination, see: Cannon, W. F., ‘The problem of miracles in the 1830s’, Victorian studies, vi (1960–1961), 5–32Google Scholar; Ellegård, , op. cit. (5), pp. 12–17.Google Scholar

107 Whewell, 1832, op. cit. (61), 117.Google Scholar

108 LLJ, ii. 468–9.Google Scholar The grammar of the passage indicates the presence of an agent who plans the details of species' structure, who ‘foresees’, ‘makes’, and ‘confers’ adaptive variations.

109 Ibid., ii. 467. I have not identified the German critics.

110 Lyell's own experience of the peculiarities of island floras and faunas, gained during a trip to the Canary Islands in 1853–4, seems to have shaken his confidence in this view. There, he found islands which had existed at least since Miocene times yet which had no indigenous land mammals. See Wilson, , in Species journals, pp. xxxvii–xli.Google Scholar

111 PG (1st edn., 1832), ii. 60.Google Scholar

112 Lyell, 1826, op. cit. (33), 513.Google Scholar

113 Lyell, 1851, op. cit. (57).Google Scholar

114 Ibid., p. lii.

115 Ibid., p. xlii.

116 Ibid., p. lxvii.

117 Ibid., p. xxxix; my italics.

118 Ibid., pp. xxviii, lxx, lxxii, lxxiii.

119 Ibid., p. lxiii.

120 Lyell's address called forth a sarcastic and highly critical review from Richard Owen. See [Owen, ], ‘Lyell on life and its successive development’, Quarterly review, lxxxix (1851), 412–51.Google Scholar

121 McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5)Google Scholar, gives an excellent discussion of aspects of Lyell's journals; see pp. 97–116.

122 Species journals, p. 238.Google Scholar

123 Ibid., pp. 292–3. Cf. pp. 222–3.

124 Ibid., p. 280.

125 Ibid., p. 57.

126 Ibid., p. 196.

127 de Beer, , op. cit. (100), 106.Google Scholar See also p. 69 for another Statement of Darwin's ready acceptance of an evolutionary ancestry for himself.

128 Species journals, pp. 427, 449, 445.Google Scholar

129 Ibid., p. 168.

130 Ibid., pp. 458–9.

131 See, for example, ibid., pp. 88, 355, 358, 427–9.

132 Ibid., p. 348. This admission came as a response to a passage in Greg, W. R.'s The creed of Christendom: its foundation and superstructure (London, 1851)Google Scholar. In the passage that Lyell cites, Greg is not discussing the natural world at all; he is discussing the hypothetical case of a man who is trying to justify a particular belief. Greg writes: ‘erroneously conceiving that it [i.e. the belief] must be a product of reason, he diligently looks about to discover the logical processes which have generated it; and clings to the shallowest crudities rather than surrender (as he conceives) the title-deeds of his faith’ (pp. 300–1). Did Lyell recognize himself here?

133 Species journals, p. 233.Google Scholar

134 See Young, , op. cit. (19), 442–503Google Scholar, where Young gives an account of Darwin's response to various attempts, including Lyell's, to reconcile evolution with the tenets of natural theology.

135 Lyell, to Darwin, , 3 10 1859Google Scholar, in LLJ, ii. 325.Google Scholar

136 Darwin, to Lyell, , 11 10 1859Google Scholar, in LLD, ii. 210–11Google Scholar; cf. ii. 174, 176–7.

137 Darwin, to Lyell, , 15 04 1860Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 303.Google Scholar

138 Darwin, to Lyell, , 10 01 1860Google Scholar, in LLD, ii. 266Google Scholar; cf. MLD, i. 191–4.Google Scholar

139 Darwin, to Lyell, , 4 05 1860Google Scholar, in LLD, ii. 262.Google Scholar Francis Darwin dates this letter 4 January 1860, but the American Philosophical Society Library dates it 4 May 1860. The latter date seems more likely.

140 Species journals, pp. 378–83.Google Scholar

141 Irvine, , op. cit. (5), p. 142.Google Scholar Irvine's book contains a sensitive account of the relationship between Darwin and Lyell after 1859.

142 Huxley seems to have responded to Lyell's criticism by modifying the passage concerned; see Huxley, to Lyell, , 17 08 1862Google Scholar, in Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, op. cit. (53), i. 200.Google Scholar The passage in question closes Huxley's essay ‘On the relations of man to the lower animals’. See Huxley, 's Man's place in nature and other anthropological essays (London, 1894), pp. 151–6.Google Scholar

143 Lyell, to Huxley, , 9 08 1862Google Scholar, Huxley papers, 6.66, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. The line from Pope, which Lyell only slightly misquotes, is from Pope, Essay on man (1 733–4), epistle II, line 34.

144 Antiquity of man, op cit. (70), p. 395.Google Scholar

145 Ibid., pp. 405–6.

146 Ibid., pp. 412.

147 Ibid., p. 421.

148 Ibid., pp. 472–3.

149 Ibid., pp. 491–3.

150 Ibid., pp. 500–1, quoted from Hallam, H., An introduction to the literature of Europe (4 vols., London, 1837–1839), iv. 162–3.Google Scholar What Lyell called Hallam's ‘profound reflections on “the thoughts of Pascal”’ (Antiquity of man, p. 500)Google Scholar are worth looking at, especially as they are the source of the phrase ‘the archangel ruined’ which Lyell uses to denote his old beliefs about man's place in creation (LLJ, ii. 362, 376Google Scholar; PG [10th edn., 1868], ii. 493)Google Scholar. Hallam says, of Pascal's conception of fallen man: ‘it is not the sordid grovelling, degraded Caliban of [the vulgar Calvinist] school, but the ruined archangel that he delights to paint’ (Hallam, , op. cit., iv. 158).Google Scholar

151 Sumner, J. B., A treatise on the records of creation and on the moral attributes of the Creator (2 vols., London, 1816)Google Scholar. Sumner's book was second prize-winner in a competition that had invited treatises on ‘the Evidence that there is a Being all-powerful, wise, and good, by whom every Thing exists; and particularly to obviate Difficulties regarding the Wisdom and the Goodness of the Deity; and this, in the first place, from Considerations independent of written Revelation; and in the second place, from the Revelation of the Lord Jesus: and from the whole, to point out the inferences most necessary for, and useful to Mankind’ (op. cit., i. p.v.). Sumner follows this specification exactly, emphasizing, in his section on natural theology, the reliability of the ‘Mosaic History’ and its lack of conflict with geological discovery, but going on to declare that ‘where Reason … leaves us, Revelation takes us up’ (volume i, p. xii).

152 Ibid., ii. 10.

153 Ibid., ii. 19.

154 See, for example, Lyell, , ‘Memoir on the geology of Central France … by G. P. Scrope’, Quarterly review, xxxvi (1827), 437–83 (475)Google Scholar, where Lyell speaks of man's ‘Capability of progressive improvement’. See also PG (1st edn., 1830), i. 156Google Scholar, where Lyell says that what especially marked the creation of man was ‘the union, for the first time, of moral and intellectual faculties capable of indefinite improvement, with the animal nature’. Perhaps the concept of ‘improvable reason’ was a commonplace, but the similarity between Lyell's and Sumner's presentation, and Lyell's decision to quote Sumner extensively, over thirty years later, in Antiquity of man, indicates a close connexion. Lyell knew Sumner personally; see LLJ, ii. 154–5.Google Scholar

155 For example: ‘if the ant has peculiar sagacity, it is but a compensation for its weakness; if the bee is remarkable for its foresight, that foresight is rendered necessary by the short duration of its harvest’ (Sumner, , op. cit. [151], ii. 17).Google Scholar

156 Quoted in Antiquity of man, p. 497.Google Scholar

157 Lyell, to Hooker, J. D., 9 03 1863Google Scholar, in LLJ, ii. 362.Google Scholar See also note 150.

151 Antiquity of man, p. 505.Google Scholar

159 Darwin, to Lyell, , 6 03 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 12.Google Scholar

160 Herschel, to Lyell, , 13–14 04 1863Google Scholar; Herschel's emphasis. Copy in Herschel papers, Royal Society of London, whose permission to quote extracts is acknowledged.

161 Darwin, to Lyell, , 12 12 1859Google Scholar, in LLD, ii. 241.Google Scholar

162 Lyell, to Darwin, , 11 03 1863Google Scholar, in LLJ, ii. 363.Google Scholar

163 Darwin, to Lyell, , 6 03 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 11.Google Scholar

164 Darwin, to Hooker, , 24 02 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 9Google Scholar; Darwin, to Gray, , 23 02 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 10.Google Scholar

165 See McKinney, 1972, op. cit. (5), pp. 95–6, 150.Google Scholar

166 Darwin, to Hooker, , 24 02 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 9.Google Scholar

167 Darwin, to Lyell, , 9 10 1866Google Scholar, in MLD, i. 272.Google Scholar

168 Wallace's response to Lyell's tenth edition was important. In his review for the Quarterly review Wallace first announced his new conviction that unaided natural selection could not exhaustively account for the emergence of man, though Wallace's reservations were different from Lyell's. See [Wallace, ], ‘Sir Charles Lyell on geological climates …’, Quarterly review, cxxvi (1869), 359–94.Google Scholar Wallace explained his new views to Lyell in a letter dated 28 April 1869. The original letter is in the American Philosophical Society's Darwin-Lyell papers, but Lyell quotes extensively from it in a letter of his own to Darwin dated 5 May 1869, in LLJ, ii. 442–3.Google Scholar For a discussion of Wallace's change of opinion concerning the evolution of man, see Smith, R., ‘Alfred Russel Wallace: philosophy of nature and man’, The British journal for the history of science, vi (1972–1973), 177–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

169 Darwin, to Lyell, , 18 07 1867Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 72.Google Scholar

170 Darwin, to Lyell, , 4 05 1868Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 117.Google Scholar

171 PG (10th edn., 1867–1868), i. 167–73.Google Scholar

172 Ibid, ii. 491–4. Lyell's position here is much the same as Asa Gray's. See Dupree, , op. cit. (64), especially pp. 48, 106.Google Scholar

173 Lyell, to Speeding, T. S., 19 05 1863Google Scholar, in LLJ, ii. 376.Google Scholar