WCP5937

[1] [p. 441]¹

To CHARLES DARWIN, Esq.

May 5 ,1869.

I am pleased at the impression which the historical part of Wallace's review² made on you. It reminds me of Cuvier's daughter,³ a charming and intelligent girl, telling me she had been reading my book (vol. i. of 'Principles')⁴ to her father,⁵ and that they had been struck with the complete antagonism of my views to those which he had propounded in his 'Theory of the Earth.'⁶

I was always made to feel myself a welcome guest at Cuvier's soirées, but he never alluded to my book, and but for Mademoiselle Cuvier's⁷ saying she had been reading it to him in their carriage as they drove out, I should never had known he had seen it. [2] [p. 442]

I quite agree with you that Wallace's sketch of natural selection is admirable. I wrote to tell him so after I had read the article, and in regard to the concluding theory, I reminded him that as to the origin of man's intellectual and moral nature I had allowed in my first edition that its introduction was a real innovation, interrupting the uniform course of the causation previously at work on the earth. I was therefore not opposed to his idea, that the Supreme Intelligence might possibly direct variation in a way analogous to that in which even the limited powers of man might guide it in selection, as in the case of the breeder and horticulturist. In other words, as I feel that progressive development or evolution cannot be entirely explained by natural selection, I rather hail Wallace's suggestion that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its functions of interference, but may guide the forces and laws of Nature. This seems to me the most probable when I consider, not without wonder, that we should be permitted to give rise to a monstrosity like the pouter pigeon, and to cause it to breed true for an indefinite number of generations, certainly not to the advantage of the variety or species so created.

At the same time I told Wallace that I thought his arguments, as to the hand, the voice, the beauty and the symmetry, the naked skin, and other attributes of man, implying a preparation for his subsequent development, might easily be controverted; that a parrot endowed with the powers of Shakespeare might dictate the 'Midsummer Night's Dream', and that Michael Angelo, if he had no better hand than belongs to some of the higher apes, might have executed the statue of Lorenzo de' Medici.

In reply to this and other analogous comments, Wallace said: 'It seems to me that if we once admit the necessity of any action beyond "natural selection" in developing man, we have no reason whatever for confining that action to his brain. On the mere doctrine of chances, it seems to me in the highest degree improbable that so many points of structure all tending to favour his mental development should concur in man, and in man alone of all animals. If the erect posture, the freedom of the anterior limbs for purposes of locomotion, the [3] p. 443] powerful and opposable thumb, the naked skin, and the great symmetry of force, the perfect organs of speech, and his mental faculties, calculation of numbers, ideas of symmetry, of justice, of abstract reasoning, of the infinite, of a future state, and many others, cannot be shown to be each and all useful to man in the very lowest state of civilisation, how are we to explain their coexistence in him alone of the whole series of organised beings? Years ago I saw a Bushman boy and girl in London, and the girl played very nicely on the piano. Blind Tom, the idiot Negro, had a musical ear or brain, perhaps superior to that of any living man. Unless you can show me how this rudimentary or latent musical faculty in the lowest races can have been developed by survival of the fittest, can have been of use to the individual or the race, so as to cause those who possessed it to win in the struggle for life, I must believe that some other power caused that development, and so on with every other especially human characteristic. It seems to me that the onus probandi [Latin: burden of proof] will lie with those who maintain that man, body and mind, could have been developed from a quadrumanous⁸ animal by natural selection.'⁹

As to the scooping out of lake-basins by glaciers, I have had a long, amicable, but controversial correspondence with Wallace on that subject,¹⁰ and I cannot get over (as, indeed, I have admitted in print) an intimate connection between the number of lakes of modern date and the glaciation of the regions containing them. But as we do not know how ice can scoop out Lago Maggiore to a depth of 2,600 feet, of which all but 600 is below the level of the sea, getting rid of the rock supposed to be worn away as if it was salt that had melted, I feel that it is a dangerous causation to admit in explanation of every cavity which we have to account for, including Lake Superior.¹¹ They who use it seem to me to have it always at hand, like the 'diluvial wave, or the wave of translation', or the 'convulsion of nature or catastrophe' of the old paroxysmists.¹²

I have just got a letter from Professor Leslie, [sic]¹³ and an important paper by him in the American 'Philosophical Society' for 1862,¹⁴ and another on a projected map, 'intended to illustrate five types of earth-surface in the United States,' published in 1866.¹⁵ He was formerly a catastrophist, but of [4] [p. 444] late years he seems to have anticipated Geikie¹⁶ and Croll¹⁷ in regard to sub-aerial denudation, giving, like them, too little to the sea. But he is a man intimately acquainted with the Appalachians, and he gives his reasons for not believing that the ice-sheet has had any hand in eroding the Appalachians. It has polished the surface, and carried erratics¹⁸ so far as mid-Pennsylvania, and no farther; but the surface erosion is just as great in Southern Pennsylvania and Virginia, &c., which was not reached by the ice, and where there is not a single glacial scratch or groove. He says that the large map which he has planned will make the ice-scooping of lakes in the United States appear as absurd as if applied to tropical Africa or the Albert Nyanza Lake.

Believe me ever affectionately yours, CHARLES LYELL.