important aspect of Lyell's intellectual life, centred upon the reading of 
Lamarck, has been given by Michael Bartholomew. A famous letter written by Lyell 
to Mantell referring to his impressions of Lamarck's book, and several passages 
of his Journals noted by L. G. Wilson, give some idea of how important to his 
intellectual development Lyell himself considered his reading of Lamarck. As 
Bartholomew has perceptively pointed out, the more Lyell reflected on Lamarck's 
theories, which had fascinated him from the first, the fuller was his 
realization of their implications (15). A letter written thirty-six years later 
gives a hint of Lyell's afterthought
 

I remember it was the conclusion he came to about man that fortified me thirty 
years ago against the great impression which his arguments at first made on my 
mind... When I came to the conclusion that after all Lamarck was going to be 
shown to be right, that we must ‘go the whole orang’, I re-read his book, and 
remembering when it was written, I felt I had done him injustice (16).
 

It therefore seems likely that it was the materialistic overtones of the 
transformist hypothesis with respect to human physiology and psychology that 
determined Lyell's strong reaction against Lamarck. Indeed, Lyell made a great 
effort to show the impossibility of a graduated scale of intelligence, of mental 
and intellectual faculties, from the less organized beings up to man. It is 
obvious, and was the more so to his contemporaries, that Lyell's arguments were 
not only opposed to a progressionist and transformist approach, but were also 
inimical to the idea that man's moral and intellectual prerogatives could be 
explained in terms of the high degree of development of physiological 
structures.
 

The materialism of Lamarck's theories was widely discussed, for instance in the 
debate between Fleming and MacLeay mentioned above. A particularly important 
attack on materialism from the point of view of the natural sciences came from 
the authoritative pen of Sir Humphry Davy (1788-1829) who emphasized, in his 
widely read Consolation in travel, or the last days of a philosopher (1830), the 
materialistic dangers of transmutationist ideas. Although Lamarck was not 
mentioned by name, it is clear that Davy was drawing upon the ideas of Lamarck 
and De Maillet. Onuphrio, one of the characters of the third dialogue, ‘The 
unknown’, states :
 

I will not support the sophisms of that school which supposes that living nature 
has undergone gradual changes by the effect of its irritability and appetencies 
; that the fish has in millions of generations ripened into the quadruped, and 
the quadruped into the man ; nor that the system of life, by its own inherent 
power, has fitted itself to the physical changes in the system of the universe. 
To this absurd, vague, atheistical doctrine, I prefer even the dream of plastic 
powers...(17)
 

Davy himself, in the same third dialogue of his Consolation, presented through 
the voice of the Unknown a progressionist and directionalist 

(15) M. J. Bartholomew, op. cit. (1) pp. 272-6 and passim.

(16) [Mrs] K. M. Lyell (ed.), Life, letters and journals of Sir Charles Lyell, 
Bart., 2 vols., London, 1881, ii, 365.
 

(17) Sir H. Davy, Consolation in travel, or, the last days of a philosopher, 
London, 1830, p. 150.