negative and critical attitude. As for the "Vestiges," I confess that
the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly
unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any
influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review
I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless
savagery, is one I wrote on the "Vestiges" while under that influence...

But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put
as little faith in modern speculations on this subject as in the
venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of 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--I
cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief
agent in 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.

Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that my own position of
critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and must have been taken
up, on the same grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told me that
the forms of life which have successively tenanted the globe were the