d of sound and experienced
naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be
privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus
initiated, or approached with a view towards possible
illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and
later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society in the
summer of 1857.

My Father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was
critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense
influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at
once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his
intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had
hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of
'Genesis' checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a
great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself
of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted
hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have
nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to
the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture
that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always
extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific
leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at
the Royal Society came to an end. His next act was to burn his
ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could
have been made. By a strange act of wilfulness, he closed the
doors upon himself forever.

My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the
famous 'Lord Chancellor manner' of the geologist intimidated him,
and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation
puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other
hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had
anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous
experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of
zoology or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book
on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell
flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long
reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly
hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify
geology to godly readers of 'Genesis'. It was, very briefly, that
there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the
earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that