Darwin.

Starting from Lyell's most advanced post, Darwin boldly advanced into
regions in which his friend was unable to lead, and indeed long
hesitated to follow. Together, for nearly forty years, the two
men--influencing one another 'as iron sharpeneth iron'--thought and
communed and worked, aided at all times by the wide knowledge and
judicious criticism of the sagacious Hooker; and together the fame of
these men will go down to posterity.

There is a tendency, when a great man has passed from our midst, to
estimate his merits and labours with undiscriminating, and often perhaps
exaggerated, admiration; and this excessive praise is too often followed
by a reaction, as the result of which the idol of one generation becomes
almost commonplace to the next. A still further period is required
before the proper position of mental perspective is reached by us, and a
just judgment can be formed of the man's real place in history. The
reputations of both Lyell and Darwin have, I think, passed through both
these two earlier phases of thought, and we may have arrived at the
third stage.

There was one respect in which both Lyell and Darwin failed to satisfy
many both of their contemporaries and successors. Lyell, like Hutton,
always deprecated attempts to go back to a 'beginning,' while Darwin,
who strongly supported Lyell in his geological views, was equally averse
to speculations concerning the 'origin of life on the globe.'
Scrope[146], and also Huxley[147] in his earlier days, held the opinion
that it was legitimate to assume or imagine a beginning, from which,
with ever diminishing energy, the existing 'comparatively quiet
conditions,' thought to characterise the present order of the world,
would be reached. Both Lyell and Darwin insisted that geology is a
historical science, and must be treated as such quite distinct from
Cosmogony. And in the end, Huxley accepted the same view[148].
'Geology,' he asserted, 'is as much a historical science as
archaeology.'

The sober historian has always had to contend against the traditional
belief that 'there were giants on the earth in those days!' The love of
the marvellous has always led to the ascription of past events to the
work of demigods who were not of like powers and passions with
ourselves. Hence the invention of those 'catastrophies'--in which the
reputations of deities as well as of men and women have often suffered.
It is the same tendency in the human mind which ma