shape, I found myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to confess my want of any means of testing the correctness of his explanation of them.  And besides that, I could by no means see what the explanation explained.  Neither did it help me to be told by an eminent anatomist that species had succeeded one another in time, in virtue of “a continuously operative creational law.”  That seemed to me to be no more than saying that species had succeeded one another in the form of a vote-catching resolution, with “law” to catch the man of science, and “creational” to draw the orthodox.  So I took refuge in that “thatige Skepsis” which Goethe has so well defined; and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmutationist; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox—­thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.

I remember, in the course of my first interview with Mr. Darwin, expressing my belief in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms, with all the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge.  I was not aware, at that time, that he had then been many years brooding over the species-question; and the humorous smile which accompanied his gentle answer, that such was not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled me.  But it would seem that four or five years’ hard work had enabled me to understand what it meant; for Lyell, writing to Sir Charles Bunbury (under date of April 30, 1856), says:—­

“When Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were at Darwin’s last week they (all four of them) ran a tilt against species—­further, I believe, than they are prepared to go.”

I recollect nothing of this beyond the fact of meeting Mr. Wollaston; and except for Sir Charles’s distinct assurance as to “all four,” I should have thought my outrecuidance was probably a counterblast to Wollaston’s conservatism.  With regard to Hooker, he was already, like Voltaire’s Habbakuk, capable du tout in the way of advocating Evolution.

As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter, were very much in my own state of mind—­inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, “a plague on both your houses!” and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion, to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact.  And I may therefore suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace paper in 1858, and still more that of the “Origin” in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself on a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight