evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the
greatest naturalist of the age with their ecclesiastical opponents.
Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more
short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution.

Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the
Italians and of Hutton; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of
clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that
natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be
proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which
have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The
publication of 'The Principles of Geology,' in 1830, constituted an
epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the
modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind
of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is
competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should
it not account for the living part?

By keeping this question before the public for some thirty years,
Lyell, though the keenest and most formidable of the opponents of the
transmutation theory, as it was formulated by Lamarck, was of the
greatest possible service in facilitating the reception of the sounder
doctrines of a later day. And, in like fashion, another vehement
opponent of the transmutation of species, the elder Agassiz, was
doomed to help the cause he hated. Agassiz not only maintained the
fact of the progressive advance in organisation of the inhabitants of
the earth at each successive geological epoch, but he insisted upon
the analogy of the steps of this progression with those by which the
embryo advances to the adult condition, among the highest forms of
each group. In fact, in endeavoring to support these views he went a