the dimmed vision of his own emotional nature the very foundations of
his beloved creed. But still he did it. He came out and was separate. In
his own idiomatic language, he found at last that 'we must go the whole
ourang;' and, deep as was the pang that the recantation cost him, he
formally retracted the condemnation of 'transformism' in his earlier
works, and accepted, however unwillingly, the theory he had so often and
so deliberately rejected.
The 'Antiquity of Man' came out in February 1863, some three years after
the 'Origin of Species.' For some time speculation had been active over
the strange hatchets which Boucher de Perthes had recently unearthed
among the Abbeville drift--shapeless masses of chipped flint rudely
fashioned into the form of an axe, which we now call palæolithic
implements, and know to be the handicraft of preglacial men. But until
Lyell's authoritative work appeared the unscientific public could not
tell exactly what to think of these curious and almost unhuman-looking
objects. Lyell at once set all doubts at rest; the magic of his name
silenced the derisive whispers of the dissidents. Already, in the
previous year, the first fasciculus of Colenso's famous work on the
Pentateuch had dealt a serious blow from the ecclesiastical and critical
side at the authenticity and historical truth of the Mosaic cosmogony.
Lyell now from the scientific side completely demolished its literal
truth, as ordinarily interpreted, by throwing back the primitive origin
of our race into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. In so doing he
was clearing the way for Charles Darwin's second great work, 'The
Descent of Man;' and by incorporating in his book Huxley's remarks on
the Neanderthal skull, and much similar evolutionary matter, he
advertised the new creed in the animal origin of our race with all the
acquired weight of his immense and justly-deserved European reputation.
As a matter of taste, Lyell did not relish the application of
evolutionism to his own species. But, with that perfect loyalty to fact
which he shared so completely with Charles Darwin, as soon as he found
the evidence overwhelming, he gave in. By that grudging concession he
immensely strengthened the position of the new creed. 'I plead guilty,'
he writes to Sir Joseph Hooker, 'to going farther in my reasoning
towards transmutation than in my sentiments and imagination, and perhaps
for that very reason I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you, than
one who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to
abandon of old and long-cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to
me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days.' And to
Darwin himself he writes regretfully. 'The descent of man from the
brutes takes away much of the charm from my speculations on the past
relating to such matters.' This very reluctance itself told powerfully
in favour of Charles Darwin's novel theories: there is no evidence more
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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