IN May 1850 a few, copies of _In Memoriam_ were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author’s name. The pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the “section about evolution” was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in _Vestiges of Creation_, were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years, again, after _In Memoriam_, came Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. These dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. “The rudimentary forms, _Inapertwa_, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing, or smell.” They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, “a word which means ‘out of nothing,’ or ‘self-existing.’ Men descend from lower animals thus evolved.” {62} This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, “I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the _Examiner_: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem.” This book was _Vestiges of Creation_. These poems are the stanzas in _In Memoriam_ about “the greater ape,” and about Nature as careless of the type: “all shall go.” The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a differentiated