IN 1887 Huxley wrote:... I see no reason to doubt 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. 1

A number of recent historians have offered a fundamentally different explanation of Lyell's reluctance to give Darwin his unqualified support. Although these historians acknowledge both the enormous influence of Lyell on Darwin, and Lyell's dismay at the loss of human dignity implied by Darwin's theory, they have attempted to show that Lyell's view of earth-history was, at bottom, a profoundly anti-evolutionary view, which could not accommodate the history of life presented by Darwin and Wallace. Cannon, Hooykaas, Rudwick, and Wilson have argued2 that