82 The Presidential Address.
out how completely the facts of Paleontology accord with
this view. But although it is thus permissible to speak of
the Darwinian theory as a theory of evolution, it must not be
forgotten that evolution is not necessarily Darwinism. It is
the more necessary to remember this in order to fully realise
the vast change in thought wrought by Darwin. Long before
the appearance of the 'Origin of Species' there had been
evolutionists. In 1809 Jean Lamarck published his 'Philo-
sophie Zoologique'; in 1828 Geoffroy St. Hilare declared his
belief in evolution ; the author of the 'Vestiges of Creation'
(1844) was an evolutionist; many others, and among them
Goethe, the Shakespeare of German literature, had expressed
the doctrine of evolution before Darwin ; but it was our own
great countryman who convinced the world of its truth. The
bare facts of morphology, of classification, and of geological
succession, are suggestive of evolution, but it required a
Darwin to point out how evolution had taken place in
organic nature.
The causes of transmutation of species assigned by the
older evolutionists were in fact inadequate. For Lamarck
these causes were mainly habit and the direct action of
external conditions; the author of the 'Vestiges' found the
causes of evolution in "impulses" implanted in living beings,
tending to adapt them to their surroundings, and causing
them to rise in the scale of organisation. It was reserved
for Darwin to clothe the skeleton hypothesis of evolution
with the flesh and blood that converted it into a living theory.
To my mind, no more convincing proof of the force of
Darwin's reasoning is to be found than in the conversion of
Sir Charles Lyell, for the whole spirit of this great geologist's
teaching was in every essential evolutionary ; and yet he had
rejected the Lamarckian hypothesis in the early editions of
his 'Principles,' wherein he had advanced long and elaborate
arguments showing the insufficiency of the French natu-
ralist's theory. But in the thirteen years' interval that
elapsed between the publication of the ninth and tenth
editions of the 'Principles of Geology,' the author's opinions
on this question had undergone a change ; and in the latter