Genesis, was perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive
a sort of pious conviction that Evolution, after all, would turn
out true. I have recently read afresh the first edition of the
'Principles of Geology'; and when I consider that this remarkable
book had been nearly thirty years in everybody's hands, and that
it brings home to any reader of ordinary intelligence a great
principle and a great fact--the principle, that the past must be
explained by the present, unless good cause be shown to the
contrary; and the fact, that, so far as our knowledge of the past
history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be shown
(The same principle and the same fact guide the result from all
sound historical investigation. Grote's 'History of Greece' is a
product of the same intellectual movement as Lyell's
'Principles.')--I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as
for myself, was the chief agent for smoothing the road for
Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as
much in the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a
new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly
greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully
eliminated from sober geological speculation.

In fact, no one was better aware of this than Lyell himself.
(Lyell, with perfect right, claims this position for himself. He
speaks of having "advocated a law of continuity even in the
organic world, so far as possible without adopting Lamarck's
theory of transmutation"...

"But while I taught that as often as certain forms of animals and
plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others
took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our