null, we may be permitted to assign due praise to the labours of Lamarck, as 
being one of the first zoologists France has produced ; as being those of a 
person, whose merit in natural history bear much the same relation to those of 
Cuvier, that the world has been commonly accustomed to institute between the 
calculations of the theoretical and the observations of the practical astronomer 
(10).
 

Fleming had good reason to believe that this conviction about the lack of 
influence of Lamarck could no longer be sustained. He was well acquainted with 
the Lamarckian Robert Edmund Grant, and was probably aware that materialistic 
and progressionist ideas were gaining force among Edinburgh students, and were 
fascinating Lyell himself who had expressed a certain admiration for Lamarck's 
work. In October 1826, Grant had anonymously published a paper entitled 
‘Observations on the nature and importance of geology’, in the Edinburgh new 
philosophical journal. Grant, who was in 1827 to become the first professor of 
comparative anatomy and zoology at University College London, expressed his deep 
admiration even for Lamarck's more controversial theories. Grant maintained that 
fossil discoveries were increasingly tending to support Lamarck's hypothesis, 
though he too recognized that
 

this meritorious philosopher... has resigned himself to the influence of 
imagination, and attempted explanations, which, from the present state of our 
knowledge, we are incapable of giving ; nevertheless we feel ourselves drawn 
towards it [i.e. Lamarck's system], and the notions of the progressive formation 
of the organic world, must be found more worthy of its First Great Author, than 
the limited conceptions that we commonly entertain (11).
 

It is possible that Lyell had become acquainted with Lamarck's ideas before 
1827, during his various journeys to France, or, even more likely, through the 
many discussions on natural history and geology he had with Fleming and Gideon 
Mantell (1790-1852), the fellow naturalist who actually gave Lyell his copy of 
the Philosophie zoologique to read (12). What is certain is that Lyell read 
Lamarck's work in February 1827, some months after the defence of Lamarck 
published in the Edinburgh new philosophical journal. The reading of Lamarck 
occupied a crucial place in the development of Lyell's ideas. His review of the 
Transactions of the Geological Society, published in the Quarterly review in 
1826, argued for a progressive and ascending scale in the succession of the 
forms of life on the surface of the earth ; even the anatomical characteristics 
of man's constitution had their own place in the progressionist model (13) ; the 
Principles of geology took an opposite line, and strongly opposed progressionism 
: man's recent entry to the stage of life was seen as unrelated to any plan of 
increasingly complex organization which during the course of ages achieved its 
most perfect result in the constitution of man.
 

This undoubtedly radical change of attitudes has been interpreted in different 
ways (14). The most recent and more organic reassessment of this 

(10) W. S. MacLeay, ‘On the dying struggle of the dichotomous system’, 
Philosophical magazine, 1830, 44, 137.
 

(11) [R- E. Grant], ‘Observations on the nature and importance of geology’, 
Edinburgh new philosophical journal, 1826, I, 297. For attribution, see 
Dictionary of national biography, at ‘Grant, R. E.’.
 

(12) On Fleming's habit of discussion with ‘young Lyell’, see J. Fleming, The 
lithology of Edimburgh, edited with a memoir by the Rev. John Duns, Edinburgh, 
1859, p. lvi.
 

(13) [C. Lyell], ‘Transactions of the Geological Society of London’, The 
quarterly review, 1826, 34, 507-40.
 

(14) R. Hooykaas, ‘Geological uniformitarianism and evolution’, Archives 
internationales d'histoire des sciences, 1966, 19, 17 ; M. J. S. Rudwick, op. 
cit. (2), p. 26.