s recorded in the annotated Catalogues drawn up
on board ship.

These catalogues have on the right-hand pages numbers and descriptions
of the specimens, and on the opposite pages notes on the specimens--the
result of experiments made at the time and written in a very small hand.
Of the subsequently made pencil notes, I shall have to speak later.
(I am greatly indebted to my friend Mr A. Harker, F.R.S., for his
assistance in examining these specimens and catalogues. He has also
arranged the specimens in the Sedgwick Museum, so as to make reference
to them easy. The specimens from Ascension and a few others are however
in the Museum at Jermyn Street.)

It is a question of great interest to determine the period and the
occasion of Darwin's first awakening to the great problem of the
transmutation of species. He tells us himself that his grandfather's
"Zoonomia" had been read by him "but without producing any effect," and
that his friend Grant's rhapsodies on Lamarck and his views on evolution
only gave rise to "astonishment." ("L.L." I. page 38.)

Huxley, who had probably never seen the privately printed volume of
letters to Henslow, expressed the opinion that Darwin could not have
perceived the important bearing of his discovery of bones in the Pampean
Formation, until they had been studied in England, and their analogies
pronounced upon by competent comparative anatomists. And this seemed to
be confirmed by Darwin's own entry in his pocket-book for 1837, "In
July opened first notebook on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly
struck from about the month of previous March on character of South
American fossils... " ("L.L." I. page 276.)

The second volume of Lyell's "Principles of Geology" was published in
January, 1832, and Darwin's copy (like that of the other two volumes,
in a sadly dilapidated condition from constant use) has in it the
inscription, "Charles Darwin, Monte Video. Nov. 1832." As everyone
knows, Darwin in dedicating the second edition of his Journal of the
Voyage to Lyell declared, "the chief part of whatever scientific merit
this journal and the other works of the author may possess, has been
derived from studying the well-known and admirable 'Principles of
Geology'".

In the first chapter of this second volume of the "Principles", Lyell
insists on the importance of the species question to the geologist,
but goes on to point out the difficulty of accepting the only
serious attempt at a transmut