The British Association for the Advancement of Science held its big annual doctrinaire picnic the next summer after the publication of Darwin's book, at Oxford. The Oxford meeting was a stormy and a well-remembered one. The 'Origin of Species' was there discussed and attacked before a biological section strangely enough presided over by Darwin's old Cambridge teacher, Professor Henslow. Though then a beneficed parish priest, Henslow had the boldness frankly to avow his own acceptance of his great pupil's startling conclusions. Huxley followed in the same path, as did also Lubbock and Hooker. On the whole, the evolutionists were already in the ascendant; the fresh young intellects especially being quick to seize upon the new pabulum so generously dealt out to them by the new evolutionism.
Among scientific minds of the first order, Lyell alone in England, heavily weighted by theological preconceptions, for awhile hung back. All his life long, as his letters show us, the great geologist had felt the powerful spell of the Lamarckian hypothesis continually enticing him with its seductive charm. He had fought against it blindly, in the passionate endeavour to preserve what he thought his higher faith in the separate and divine creation of man; but ever and anon he returned anew to the biological Circe with a fresh fascination, as the moth returns to the beautiful flame that has scorched and singed it. In a well-known passage in the earlier editions of his 'Principles of Geology,' the father of uniformitarianism gives at length his own reasons for dissenting from the doctrine of evolution as then set forth; and even after Darwin's discovery had supplied him with a new clue, a _vera causa_, a sufficient power for the modification of species into fresh forms, theological difficulties made him cling still as long as possible to the old theory of the origin of man which he loved to describe as that of the 'archangel ruined.' He was loth to exchange this cherished belief for the degrading alternative (as it approved itself to him) of the ape elevated. But in the end, with the fearless honesty of a searcher after truth, he gave way slowly and regretfully. Always looking back with something like remorse to the flesh-pots of the ecclesiastical Egypt, with its enticing visions of fallen grandeur, the great thinker whose uniformitarian theory of geology had more than aught else paved the way for the gradual acceptance of Darwin's evolutionism, came out at last from the house of bondage, and nobly ranged himself on the side of what his intellect judged to be the truth of nature, though his emotions urged him hard to blind his judgment and to neglect its lights for an emotional figment. Science has no more pathetic figure than that of the old philosopher, in his sixty-sixth year, throwing himself with all the eagerness of youth into what he had long considered the wrong scale, and vigorously wrecking in the 'Antiquity of Man' what seemed to the dimmed vision of his own emotional nature the very foundations of his beloved creed. But still he did it. He came out and was separate. In his own idiomatic language, he found at last that 'we must go the whole ourang;' and, deep as was the pang that the recantation cost him, he formally retracted the condemnation of 'transformism' in his earlier works, and accepted, however unwillingly, the theory he had so often and so deliberately rejected.