Charles Lyell

“ While, in 1832, I argued against Lamarck's doctrine of the gradual transmutation of one species into another, I agreed with him in believing that the system of changes now in progress in the organic world would afford, when fully understood, a complete key to the interpretation of all the vicissitudes of the living creation in past ages. I contended against the doctrine, then very popular, of the sudden destruction of vast multitudes of species, and the abrupt ushering into the world of new batches of plants and animals. ”

“ When we reflect, therefore, on the fractional state of the annals which are handed down to us, and how little even these have as yet been studied, we may wonder that so many geologists should attribute every break in the series of strata, and every gap in the past history of the organic world, to catastrophes and convulsions of the earth's crust, or to leaps made by the creational force from species to species, or from class to class. ”

“ When I formerly advocated the doctrine that species were primordial creations, and not derivative, I endeavoured to explain the manner of their geographical distribution, and the affinity of living forms to the fossil types nearest akin to them in the tertiary strata of the same part of the globe, by supposing that the creative power, which originally adapts certain types to aquatic and others to terrestrial conditions, has, at successive geological epochs introduced new forms best suited to each area and climate, so as to fill the places of those which may have died out. ”

“ So long as physiologists continued to believe that man had not existed on the earth above six thousand years, they might, with good reason, withhold their assent from the doctrine of a unity of origin of so many distinct races; but the difficulty becomes less and less, exactly in proportion as we enlarge our ideas of the lapse of time during which different communities may have spread slowly, and become isolated, each exposed for ages to a peculiar set of conditions, whether of temperature, or food, or danger, or ways of living. ”

“ Although the speakers may be unconscious that any great fluctuation is going on in their language,—although when we observe the manner in which new words and phrases are thrown out, as if at random or in sport, while others get into vogue, we may think the process of change to be the result of mere chance,—there are nevertheless fixed laws in action, by which, in the general struggle for existence, some terms and dialects gain the victory over others. ”

“ The theory of the origin of new species by variation will also explain why a species which has once died out never reappears, and why the fossil fauna and flora recede farther and farther from the living type in proportion as we trace it back to remoter ages. It would also account for the fact, that when we have to intercalate a new set of fossiliferous strata between two groups previously known, the newly discovered fossils serve to fill up gaps between specific or generic types previously familiar to us, supplying often the missing links of the chain, which, if transmutation is accepted, must once have been continuous. ”

“ But while rejecting transmutation, I was equally opposed to the popular theory that the creative power had diminished in energy, or that it had been in abeyance ever since man had entered upon the scene. That a renovating force, which had been in full operation for millions of years, should cease to act while the causes of extinction were still in full activity, or even intensified by the accession of man's destroying power, seemed to me in the highest degree improbable. ”

“ The only point on which I doubted was, whether the force might not be intermittent instead of being, as Lamarck supposed, in ceaseless operation. Might not the births of new species, like the deaths of old ones, be sudden? Might they not still escape our observation? If the coming in of one new species, and the loss of one other which had endured for ages, should take place annually, still, assuming that there are a million of animals and plants living on the globe, it would require, I observed, a million of years to bring about a complete revolution in the fauna and flora. ”

“ But Lamarck taught not only that species had been constantly undergoing changes from one geological period to another, but that there also had been a progressive advance of the organic world from the earliest to the latest times, from beings of the simplest to those of more and more complex structure, and from the lowest instincts up to the highest, and, finally, from brute intelligence to the reasoning powers of Man. ”

“ To many, this doctrine of Natural Selection, or 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,' seems so simple, when once clearly stated, and so consonant with known facts and received principles, that they have difficulty in conceiving how it can constitute a great step in the progress of science. Such is often the case with important discoveries, but in order to assure ourselves that the doctrine was by no means obvious, we have only to refer back to the writings of skilful naturalists who attempted in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, to theorise on this subject, before the invention of this new method of explaining how certain forms are supplanted by new ones, and in what manner these last are selected out of innumerable varieties, and rendered permanent. ”

“ If, in conformity with the theory of progression, we believe mankind to have risen slowly from a rude and humble starting point, such leaps may have successively introduced not only higher and higher forms and grades of intellect, but at a much remoter period may have cleared at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason manifested by man. ”

“ Had the talus which concealed from view the ancient hearth with its cinders and the massive stone portal of the Aurignac grotto escaped all human interference for thousands of years to come, there is no reason to suppose that the small stream at the foot of the hill of Fajoles would have undermined it. ”

“ If any such lie hid in those strata, and should hereafter be revealed to us, they would carry back the antiquity of man to a distance of time probably more than twice as great as that which separates our era from that of the most ancient of the tool-bearing gravels yet discovered in Picardy, or elsewhere. ”

“ If I were considering merely the cultivators of geology, I should say that the doctrine of the former co-existence of man with many extinct mammalia had already gone through these three phases in the progress of every scientific truth towards acceptance. ”

“ After commenting on these purely imaginary causes, I pointed out in 1832, as the two great flaws in Lamarck's attempt to explain the origin of species, first, that he had failed to adduce a single instance of the initiation of a new organ in any species of animal or plant; and secondly, that variation, whether taking place in the course of nature or assisted artificially by the breeder and horticulturist, had never yet gone so far as to produce two races sufficiently remote from each other in physiological constitution as to be sterile when intermarried, or, if fertile, only capable of producing sterile hybrids, &c. ”

“ What may be the antiquity of the earliest human remains preserved in the Danish peat cannot be estimated in centuries with any approach to accuracy. In the first place, in going back to the bronze age, we already find ourselves beyond the reach of history or even of tradition. In the time of the Romans the Danish Isles were covered, as now, with magnificent beech forests. Nowhere in the world does this tree flourish more luxuriantly than in Denmark, and eighteen centuries seem to have done little or nothing towards modifying the character of the forest vegetation. ”

“ In our attempts to account for the origin of species, we find ourselves still sooner brought face to face with the working of a law of developement of so high an order as to stand nearly in the same relation as the Deity himself to man's finite understanding, a law capable of adding new and powerful causes, such as the moral and intellectual faculties of the human race, to a system of nature which had gone on for millions of years without the intervention of any analogous cause. ”

“ Instead of its being part of the plan of nature to store up enduring records of a large number of the individual plants and animals which have lived on the surface, it seems to be her chief care to provide the means of disencumbering the habitable areas lying above and below the waters of those myriads of solid skeletons of animals, and those massive trunks of trees, which would otherwise soon choke up every river, and fill every valley. ”

“ Every link in the long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps from one creature to another, which, though not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. ”

“ It is probable that causes more general and powerful than the agency of Man, alterations in climate, variations in the range of many species of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and of plants, geographical changes in the height, depth, and extent of land and sea, some or all of these combined, have given rise, in a vast series of years, to the annihilation, not only of many large mammalia, but to the disappearance of the Cyrena fluminalis, once common in the rivers of Europe, and to the different range or relative abundance of other shells which we find in the European drifts. ”

“ When we contemplate the area which is now exposed to the abrading action of ice, or which is the receptacle of moraine matter thrown down from melting glaciers or bergs, we at once perceive that the submarine area is the most extensive of the two. The number of large icebergs which float annually to great distances in the northern and southern hemisphere is extremely great, and the quantity of stone and mud which they carry about with them enormous. ”

“ Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius be found to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to the ages of bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining our imaginations to guess the possible uses and meaning of such relics—machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems, beyond the wants or even the conception of living mathematicians. ”

“ The extent to which even a considerably advanced state of civilisation may become fixed and stereotyped for ages, is the wonder of Europeans who travel in the East. One of my friends declared to me, that whenever the natives expressed to him a wish 'that he might live a thousand years,' the idea struck him as by no means extravagant, seeing that if he were doomed to sojourn for ever among them, he could only hope to exchange in ten centuries as many ideas, and to witness as much progress, as he could do at home in half a century. ”

“ In that case, I imagined that, although the first appearance of a new form might be as abrupt as the disappearance of an old one, yet naturalists might never yet have witnessed the first entrance on the stage of a large and conspicuous animal or plant, and as to the smaller kinds, many of them may be conceived to have stolen in unseen, and to have spread gradually over a wide area, like species migrating into new provinces. ”

“ M. Charpentier, who conceived the Alps in the period of greatest cold to have been higher by several thousand feet than they are now, had already suggested that the Alpine glaciers once reached continuously to the Jura, conveying thither the large erratics in question. [2] M. Agassiz, on the other hand, instead of introducing distinct and separate glaciers, imagined that the whole valley of Switzerland might have been filled with ice, and that one great sheet of it extended from the Alps to the Jura, the two chains being of the same height as now relatively to each other. ”

“ It is naturally a matter of no small surprise that, after we have collected many hundred flint implements (including knives, many thousands) , not a single human bone has yet been met with in the alluvial sand and gravel of the Somme. This dearth of the mortal remains of our species holds true equally, as yet, in all other parts of Europe where the tool-bearing drift of the post-Pliocene period has been investigated in valley deposits. Yet in these same formations there is no want of bones of mammalia belonging to extinct and living species. ”

“ The people of Aurignac, astonished to hear of the occurrence of so many human relics in so lonely a spot, flocked to the cave, and Dr. Amiel, the Mayor, ordered all the bones to be taken out and reinterred in the parish cemetery. But before this was done, having as a medical man a knowledge of anatomy, he ascertained by counting the homologous bones that they must have formed parts of no less than seventeen skeletons of both sexes, and all ages; some so young that the ossification of some of the bones was incomplete. ”

“ When we contemplate, for example, the many hundred millions of human beings who now people the earth, we behold thousands who are doomed to helpless imbecility, and we may trace an insensible gradation between them and the half-witted, and from these again to individuals of perfect understanding, so that tens of thousands must have existed in the course of ages, who in their moral and intellectual condition, have exhibited a passage from the irrational to the rational, or from the irresponsible to the responsible. ”