coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s
brains.”
LYELL, who saw change occurring always and everywhere in the world
around him, drew the line at life. That a species of plant or animal might,
over time, give rise to a new one he found unthinkable, and he devoted
much of the second volume of the Principles to attacking the idea, at one
point citing Cuvier’s mummified cat experiment in support of his
objections.
Lyell’s adamant opposition to transmutation, as it was known in
London, is almost as puzzling as Cuvier’s. New species, Lyell realized,
regularly appeared in the fossil record. But how they originated was an
issue he never really addressed, except to say that probably each one had
begun with “a single pair, or individual, where an individual was
sufficient” and multiplied and spread out from there. This process, which
seemed to depend on divine or at least occult intervention, was clearly at
odds with the precepts he had laid out for geology. Indeed, as one
commentator observed, it seemed to require “exactly the kind of miracle”
that Lyell had rejected.
With his theory of natural selection, Darwin once again “out-Lyelled”
Lyell. Darwin recognized that just as the features of the inorganic world—
deltas, river valleys, mountain chains—were brought into being by
gradual change, the organic world similarly was subject to constant flux.
Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, birds and fish and—most discomfiting of all
—humans had come into being through a process of transformation that
took place over countless generations. This process, though
imperceptibly slow, was, according to Darwin, still very much going on; in
biology, as in geology, the present was the key to the past. In one of the
most often-quoted passages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote:
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the
world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding
up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity