t in the letter to Darwin, March 11, 1863, page
363:--

"I think the old 'creation' is almost as much required as ever, but of
course it takes a new form if Lamarck's views improved by yours are
adopted.") that, if Sir Charles could have avoided the inevitable
corollary of the pithecoid origin of man--for which, to the end of his
life, he entertained a profound antipathy--he would have advocated the
efficiency of causes now in operation to bring about the condition of
the organic world, as stoutly as he championed that doctrine in
reference to inorganic nature.

The fact is, that a discerning eye might have seen that some form or
other of the doctrine of transmutation was inevitable, from the time
when the truth enunciated by William Smith that successive strata are
characterised by different kinds of fossil remains, became a firmly
established law of nature. No one has set forth the speculative
consequences of this generalisation better than the historian of the
'Inductive Sciences':--

"But the study of geology opens to us the spectacle of many groups of
species which have, in the course of the earth's history, succeeded
each other at vast intervals of time; one set of animals and plants
disappearing, as it would seem, from the face of our planet, and
others, which did not before exist, becoming the only occupants of the
globe. And the dilemma then presents itself to us anew:--either we
must accept the doctrine of the transmutation of species, and must
suppose that the organized species of one geological epoch were
transmuted into those of another by some long-continued agency of
natural causes; or else, we must believe in many successive acts of
creation and extinction of species, out of the common course of nature;
acts which, therefore, we may properly call miraculous." (Whewell's
'History of the Inductive Sciences.' Edition ii., 1847, volume iii.
pages 624-625. See for the author's verdict, pages 638-39.)

Dr. Whewell decides in favour of the latter conclusion. And if any one
had plied him with the four questions which he puts to Lyell in the
passage already cited, all that can be said now is that he would
certainly have rejected the first. But would he really have had the
courage to say that a Rhinoceros tichorhinus, for instance, "was
produced without parents;" or was "evolved from some embryo substance;"
or that it suddenly started from the ground like Milton's lion "pawing
to get free his hinder pa