Alfred Tennyson Author:Andrew Lang Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 6i IN MEMORIAM. In May 1850 a few copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author's name. The pieces ha... more »d been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the " section about evolution" was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin's Origin of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments." The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing, or smell." They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, " a word which means ' out of nothing,' or 'self-existing.' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved."1 This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief...« less