Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

The publication of The Origin of Species met, as might have been expected, with a passionate response, both pro and con, including a stormy meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science shortly after publication. The larger debate can perhaps best be glimpsed by disinterring the literary reviews of the day. These magazines, generally published monthly, covered the widest range of topics—fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, politics, philosophy, religion, and science. Reviews of twenty printed pages were not uncommon. Almost all articles were unsigned, although many were written by the leading figures in their fields. Comparable publications in the English language seem sparse today, although The Times of London’s Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books perhaps come closest.

The Westminster Review of January 1860 recognized that Darwin’s book might be of historic significance:If the principle of Modification by Natural Selection should be admitted to anything like the extent to which Mr. Darwin would carry it … a grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened … Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation.⁶

The Edinburgh Review of April 1860 (in an unsigned critique by the anatomist Richard Owen) took a less charitable view:The considerations involved in the attempt to disclose the origin of the worm are inadequate to the requirements of the higher problem of the origin of man … To him, indeed, who may deem himself devoid of soul and as the brute that perisheth, any speculation, pointing, with the smallest feasibility, to an intelligible notion of the way of coming in of a lower organised species, may be sufficient, and he need concern himself no further about his own relations to a Creator … Mr. Darwin offers us … intellectual husks … endorsed by his firm belief in their nutritive sufficiency.⁷

The reviewer praises scientists “who trouble the intellectual world little with their beliefs, but enrich it greatly with their proofs,” and contrasts them to Darwin, who is said to have no more than “a discursive and superficial knowledge of nature.”

Professor Owen is much impressed by the work of Cuvier on the mummified ibises, cats, and crocodiles “preserved in the tombs of Egypt,” which prove “that no change in their specific characters has taken place during the thousands of years … which had elapsed … since the individuals of those species were the subjects of the mummifier’s skill.” Cuvier’s data, it is said, were of “far higher value” than the “speculations” of Darwin. But the mummified animals of ancient Egypt walked the Earth only a split second ago on the geological time scale—not nearly long enough ago to show major evolutionary change, which characteristically requires millions of years. Owen’s review ripples with florid scorn: “Prosaic minds,” it says, “are apt to bore one by asking for our proofs, and one feels almost provoked, when seduced to the brink of such a draught of forbidden knowledge as the [evolutionists] offer, to have the Circean cup dashed away” by more knowledgeable experts of a different opinion.