Excerpt from Evolution: Darwinian and Spencerian, the Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at the Museum, 8 December 1910

During the Darwinian celebration here last year it was claimed that through Lyell, who was a pupil of Buckland's, Oxford had some influence in moulding the career of Charles Darwin, whose indebtedness to the illustrious pioneer of modern Geology is notorious. Such influence as Buckland had in forming Lyell's geological views was, however, of a negative rather than of a positive character, for the pupil's reputation was ultimately made by overthrowing the teaching of his master. In a similarly indirect way, and also through Lyell, Oxford may be said to have influenced Herbert Spencer, since he first read the Principles of Geology in 1840, when twenty years old, and the arguments advanced in the early editions of that work against Lamarck's theory of animal development led him, as he has told us in his Autobiography, to a partial acceptance of Lamarck's views In a more direct way may Oxford claim also to have influenced Spencer, since Dean Mansel, the author of those well-known Bampton Lectures so freely quoted in the First Principles, was a distinguished member of this University. Whether Spencer's early acceptance of Lamarckism is responsible for his later tenacity in combating the views of that school of biologists founded by Weismann is a point which might serve for academic discussion, but whatever.

See also the Filiation of Ideas in Duncan's Life and Letters, p. 536.

View may be held concerning his attitude with respect to this question, there can be no doubt that his mind was given a bias towards development as a principle at this early stage in his career. Through all his subsequent writings the underlying idea of development can be traced with increasing depth and breadth, expanding in 1850 in his Social Statics to a foreshadowing of the general doctrine of Evolution.1 In 1852 his views on organic evolution had become so definite that he gave public expression to them in that well-known and powerful essay on The Development Hypothesis, first published in The Leader. In the Principles of Psychology, the first edition of which was published in 1855, the evolutionary principle was dominant. By 1858 - the year of the announcement of Natural Selection by Darwin and Wallace - he had conceived the general scheme and had sketched out the first draft of the prospectus of the Synthetic Philosophy, the final and amended syllabus having been issued in 1860. The work of Darwin and Spencer from that period, although moving along inde pendent lines, was directed towards the same end, not withstanding the diversity of the materials which they made use of and the differences in their methods of attack that end was the establishment of Evolution as a great natural principle or law.

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