model of interpretation for the succession of life on earth. Lyell, aware of how
Davy's opinions weighed with his contemporaries, criticized this scientist's
views in chapter IX of the first volume of the Principles.
Davy was aware of the possible materialistic uses of a progressionist model.
Philalethes, in the fourth dialogue, strongly attacked the progressionist
interpretation of the development of the nervous system on the grounds of its
atheistical overtones. In an implicit reference to the lectures delivered by
William Lawrence at the Royal College of Surgeons, and published in 1819,
Philalethes remarked :
When I heard with disgust, in the dissecting room, the plan of the physiologist,
of the gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability,
ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by its
own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence, a walk into
the green fields or woods by the banks of rivers brought back my feelings from
Nature to God (18).
Lyell was not insensible to the writings of the political economists, and to the
general cultural climate in which more and more stress was put on the
possibility (and ideological necessity) of explaining natural phenomena in terms
of ‘secondary causes’, or necessary laws ; he was not, therefore, sympathetic
towards an approach which tended to place more than the due emphasis on the
providential element in the government of nature. But nor was he willing to
accept a scientific hypothesis which explicitly favoured materialistic
conclusions. He thought that it was possible to implement a fully scientific
approach to the natural sciences without affronting the prejudices of the age
and his own beliefs. We shall see how he was convinced that he had elaborated an
acceptable natural explanation of the succession of species through geological
epochs, and how at the same time he thought he had avoided any link with
Lamarck, presenting himself as the definitive critic of transformism.
Another event which can help our understanding of Lyell's attitude towards
Lamarck was the publication in 1826 of J. C. Prichard's (1786-1848) second
edition of his Researches into the physical history of mankind (19). Prichard,
following Ray, Buffon and Blumenbach, defined species as groups of individuals
which could interbreed, and produce offspring capable of perpetuating their
type. Species modified themselves into varieties according to differences of
circumstances, although the extent of the variability was thought to be very
limited. Prichard also doubted whether such variations could be explained in
terms of the direct action of the environment. The physiological character of
species, the possibility of procreation, never altered. Prichard admitted that
several species exhibited an impressive number of morphological varieties, as in
the case of the dog, of the horse, and of man himself. But no degree of
diversity placed in question the unity of these different varieties, or of their
being only morphological modifications of the same species.
(18) Ibid., p. 219.
(19) J. C. Prichard, Researches into the physical history of mankind, 2nd edn.,
London 1826, i, 97 ; quoted by Lyell, Principles, ii, 52. For a brief but
substantially correct assessment of Prichard's position in the anthropological
debates of the early nineteenth century, see W. F. Bynum, ‘The great chain of
being’, History of science, 1975, 13, 13 and passim. For a more complete
consideration of Lyell's debts to Prichard's work, see F. N. Egerton, ‘Studies
in animal population from Lamarck to Darwin’, Journal of the history of biology,
1968, I, 225-59
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