existing.' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved." {7}

This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only
mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind
from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been
the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of
creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern
European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others
had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the
originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded
from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when
they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not
patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr
Moxon, "I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the
Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have
been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one
poem." This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the
stanzas in In Memoriam about "the greater ape," and about Nature as
careless of the type: "all shall go." The poetic and philosophic
originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the
effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long
before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin's Origin of
Species. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned,
with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a
differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life
(which is taken for granted), where are man's title-deeds to these
possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these
presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only
chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future
life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always