About this time Darwin seems to have heard that Lyell had made up his mind to admit the doctrine of evolution into a new edition of the “Manual,” and he wrote (November 23rd):—
“I honour you most sincerely. To have maintained in the position of a master, one side of a question for thirty years, and then deliberately give it up, is a fact to which I much doubt whether the records of science offer a parallel.”
Lyell’s public confession of faith was, however, not to be made for some years, and Darwin’s letter was a little premature.
Space will not permit me to quote from the long correspondence with Lyell in the years following the appearance of the “Origin,” although these letters are of the deepest interest, and deal in the most luminous manner with the difficulties of natural selection and evolution, as they appeared to one of the acutest intellects of that time. The letters soon began to produce an effect, and Darwin wrote (September 26th, 1860) to Asa Gray:—
“I can perceive in my immense correspondence with Lyell, who objected to much at first, that he has, perhaps unconsciously to himself, converted himself very much during the last six months, and I think this is the case even with Hooker. This fact gives me far more confidence than any other fact.”
Later on Darwin evidently became a little annoyed that Lyell still delayed to declare his belief one way or the other. Thus he wrote to Asa Gray (May 11th, 1863):—
“You speak of Lyell as a judge; now what I complain of is that he declines to be a judge.... I have sometimes almost wished that Lyell had pronounced against me. When I say ‘me,’ I only mean change of species by descent. That seems to me the turning-point. Personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the question of Creation or Modification.”
Shortly before this date, on February 24th, he wrote to Hooker in much the same style. These communications were called forth by the appearance of “The Antiquity of Man,” and it is clear that Darwin’s disappointment at Lyell’s suspended judgment was due to their correspondence, which had encouraged him to expect some definite opinion on the question. “From all my communications with him, I must ever think that he has really entirely lost faith in the immortality of species,” he wrote in his letter to Hooker. On March 6th he wrote to Lyell himself, expressing his disappointment, and again a few days later, rather complaining that his work was treated as a modification of Lamarck’s:—
“This way of putting the case ... closely connects Wallace’s and my views with what I consider, after two deliberate readings, as a wretched book, and one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.”
When the second edition of “The Antiquity of Man” appeared in a few months, there was a significant change in one sentence:—