7O CHARLES DARWIN 



doctrine. At last, in 1844, Robert Chambers published 

 anonymously his famous and much-debated ' Vestiges 

 of Creation,' which brought down the question of evolu- 

 tion versus creation from the senate of savants to the 

 arena of the mere general public, and set up at once a 

 universal fever of inquiry into the mysterious question 

 of the origin of species. Chambers himself was a man 

 rather of general knowledge and some native philo- 

 sophical insight than of any marked scientific accuracy 

 or depth. His work in its original form displayed 

 comparatively little acquaintance with the vast ground- 

 work of the question at issue zoological, botanical, 

 geological, and so forth and in Charles Darwin's own 

 opinion showed ' a great want of scientific caution.' 

 But its graphic style, its vivid picturesqueness, and to 

 the world at large the startling novelty of its brilliant 

 and piquant suggestions, made it burst at once into an 

 unwonted popularity for a work of so distinctly philo- 

 sophical a character. In nine years it leaped rapidly 

 through no less than ten successive editions, and re- 

 mained until the publication of the ' Origin of Species ' 

 the chief authoritative exponent in England of the still 

 struggling evolutionary principle. 



The ' Vestiges of Creation ' may be succinctly de- 

 scribed as Lamarck and water, the watery element 

 being due in part to the unnecessary obtrusion (more 

 Scotico) of a metaphysical and theological principle into 

 the physical universe. Chambers himself, in his latest 

 edition (before the book was finally killed by the advent 

 of Darwinism), thus briefly describes his main concepts : 

 ' The several series of animated beings, from the simplest 

 and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, under 



