Charles Lyell

“ 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. ”

“ INDEPENDENT CREATION. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The author of an elaborate review of Darwin's "Origin of Species," himself an accomplished geologist, declares that if we embrace the doctrine of the continuous variation of all organic forms from the lowest to the highest, including Man as the last link in the chain of being, there must have been a transition from the instinct of the brute to the noble mind of Man; and in that case, "where," he asks, "are the missing links, and at what point of his progressive improvement did Man acquire the spiritual part of his being, and become endowed with the awful attribute of immortality?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may be thought almost paradoxical that writers who are most in favour of transmutation (Mr. C. Darwin and Dr. J. Hooker, for example) are nevertheless among those who are most cautious, and one would say timid, in their mode of espousing the doctrine of progression; while, on the other hand, the most zealous advocates of progression are oftener than not very vehement opponents of transmutation. We might have anticipated a contrary leaning on the part of both, for to what does the theory of progression point? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems indeed more and more evident that when we speculate in future on the pedigree of any extinct quadruped which abounds in the drift or caverns of Europe, we shall have to look to North and South America as a principal source of information. Thirty years ago, if we had been searching for fossil types which might fill up a gap between two species or genera of the horse tribe (or great family of the Solipedes) , we might have thought it sufficient to have got together as ample materials as we could obtain from the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. ”

“ 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 development 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 no 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet the principle exists unquestionably, and whether it be called soul, reason, or instinct, it presents, in the whole range of organised beings, a series of phenomena closely linked together, and upon it are based not only the higher manifestations of the mind, but the very permanence of the specific differences which characterise every organ. Most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of Man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the same reason we may understand why the species of the same genus, or genera of the same family, resemble each other more nearly in their embryonic than in their more fully developed state, or how it is that in the eyes of most naturalists the structure of the embryo is even more important in classification than that of the adult, "for the embryo is the animal in its less modified state, and in so far it reveals the structure of its progenitor. ”

“ 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 manner in which some species are now becoming scarce and dying out, one after the other, appeared to me to favour the doctrine of the fixity of the specific character, showing a want of pliancy and capability of varying, which ensured their annihilation whenever changes adverse to their well-being occurred; time not being allowed for such a transformation as might be conceived capable of adapting them to the new circumstances, and of converting them into what naturalists would call new species. ”

“ In the case of the occasional birth of an individual of superior genius there is certainly no break in the regular genealogical succession; and when all the mists of mythological fiction are dispelled by historical criticism, when it is acknowledged that the earth did not tremble at the nativity of the gifted infant and that the face of heaven was not full of fiery shapes, still a mighty mystery remains unexplained, and it is the ORDER of the phenomena, and not their CAUSE, which we are able to refer to the usual course of nature. ”

“ The endless variety in the sections of the alluvium of the valley of the Somme, may be ascribed to the frequent silting up of the main stream and its tributaries during different stages of the excavation of the valley, probably also during changes in the level of the land. As a rule, when a river attacks and undermines one bank, it throws down gravel and sand on the opposite side of its channel, which is growing somewhere shallower, and is soon destined to be raised so high as to form an addition to the alluvial plain, and to be only occasionally inundated. ”

“ But if a great glacier fill the lower part of the valley all the conditions of the problem are altered. Instead of the mud, sand, and stones drifted down from the higher regions being left behind in the incipient basin, they all travel onwards in the shape of moraines on the top of the ice, passing over and beyond the new depression, so that when at the end of fifty or a thousand centuries the glacier melts, a large and deep basin representing the difference in the movement of two adjoining mountain areas—namely, the central and the circumferential—is for the first time rendered visible. ”

“ 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. ”