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When the Vestiges was first published, 

 1844, Queen Victoria was twenty-five 

 years old and had reigned only six years, 

 so her era had hardly achieved its full 

 bloom. Darwin completed that year the 

 second of two important notebooks that 

 included ideas to be more fully developed 

 in the Origin of Species, published fifteen 

 years later. Robert Chambers, publicly} 

 acknowledged as the author of the Vestiges j 

 only in its last edition, which appeared! 

 forty years after the first, was not anotheiy 

 Darwin. 



Chambers knew some geology, but little 

 biology at first hand. As Sir Gavin de Beer 

 puts it in his introduction to this new edi- 

 tion, in this book he "constructed an argu- 

 ment out of a forest of loose ends for the 

 erection of a system." The system was one 

 which, while not denying all the tenets of 

 theology, challenged some. "We. . .see 

 the Deity operating in the most august of 

 his works by fixed laws," wrote Chambers. 

 "The mechanical laws are so definite in 



their purposes, that no exceptions ever 

 take place in that department; ... but 

 the laws presiding over meteorology, life, 

 and mind, are necessarily less definite." 

 And he expressed belief in spontaneous 

 generation and in transmutation of species. 

 Although Chambers was not the first to 

 introduce such ideas, as Sir Gavin makes 

 clear to those not already aware of this 

 fact, the book was influential with its 

 general readers. It passed through twelve 

 e J^P n j 5 ' ten in its first ten years. Scientific 

 readers were more critical of it. Huxley- 

 said that he must have read it "before 

 1846, but if I did, the book made very 

 little impression on me." Darwin himself 

 wrote of its author, when it first appeared, 

 that "his geology strikes me as bad and 

 his zoology far worse." But, as Sir Gavin 

 points out, Darwin learned from some of 

 Chambers' errors. 



