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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
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References
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6 For example, Wallace, Sedgwick, Hooker, Spencer, and Darwin himself. See notes 63–5.
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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
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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.
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35 Ibid., 518.
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42 Ibid.
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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 …’
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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
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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.
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72 Ibid., i. chapters VII–VIII.
73 Ibid., i. 141–3. Lyell's italics.
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88 Ibid., ii. 19.
89 Ibid., ii. 8–9.
90 Ibid., ii. 173–4. Cf. Coleman, , op. cit. (85), 335.Google Scholar
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96 Ibid., ii. 42.
97 Ibid., ii. 125.
98 Ibid., ii. 136.
99 Ibid., ii. 41.
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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
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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
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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
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124 Ibid., p. 280.
125 Ibid., p. 57.
126 Ibid., p. 196.
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129 Ibid., p. 168.
130 Ibid., pp. 458–9.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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151 Antiquity of man, p. 505.Google Scholar
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166 Darwin, to Hooker, , 24 02 1863Google Scholar, in LLD, iii. 9.Google Scholar
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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
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