ionists of 1851-8. Within the ranks of the
biologists, at that time, I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant, of
University College, who had a word to say for Evolution--and his
advocacy was not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks,
the only person known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled
respect, and who was, at the same time, a thorough-going evolutionist,
was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852,
and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to
think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles
we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and
copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic
position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that
time, the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient;
and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the
transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to
explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at that
time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable.

In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 'Biologie.'
However, I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the
'Vestiges' with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good
ground for changing my 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.

With respect to the 'Philosophie Zoologique,' it is no reproach to
Lamarck to say that the discussion of the Species question in that
work, whatever might be said for it in 1809, was miserably below the
level of the knowledge of half a century later. In that interval of
time the elucidation of the structure of the lower animals and plants
had given rise to wholly new conceptions of their relations; histology
and embryology, in the modern sense, had been created; physiology had
been reconstituted; the facts of distribution, geological and
geographical, had been prodigiously multiplied and reduced to order.
To any biologist whose studies had carried him beyond mere