b TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



authorship of which was for nearly forty years entirely 

 unknown save to five people. In 1883, however, on the 

 death of Wm, Chambers, of Edinburgh, his brother Kobert 

 was authoritatively announced by his friend, Mr. Alexander 

 Ireland, the sole survivor of the five, as the author. The 

 chief object of the book was to extend the conception of 

 the province of law in the universe, and to establish the 

 theory of development. It is conceived and written in a 

 distinctly reverent and religious spirit. The writer held 

 that every discovery of a new scientific truth was but a 

 stepping-stone to something beyond, leading to a more 

 accurate knowledge of the laws by which the Divine 

 mind acts in the material and moral w T orld. As a purely 

 literary work the " Vestiges " sufficiently shows the 

 extremely wide mind of its author, as well as his powers 

 of observation. The interest attaching to the work is 

 now, however, chiefly historical, many of the statements 

 probably resting on insufficient evidence. It deservedly 

 produced a great sensation at the time, and was the 

 immediate forerunner of Darwin's theory of evolution, 

 although Darwin himself appears to have been little 

 influenced by the book, or, indeed, enamoured with it, 

 for he writes to Hooker respecting it — " The writing 

 and arrangement are certainly admirable, but the geology 

 strikes me as bad, and the zoology far worse." 



Two other John the Baptists of evolution must not be 

 passed over without mention, as affecting the thought of 

 the early part of this century, viz., Erasmus Darwin 

 [Plate II. J and Lamarck. The former, grandfather to 

 the greatest of modern naturalists, was a well-known 

 Lichfield physician, devoting his spare hours to garden- 

 ing and natural history pursuits. Of his several writings, 

 "Zoonomia" (published in 1794) is best known — a work 

 on the laws of organic life, written with a view to unravel 

 the theory of diseases. 



