Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord, University of Chicago Press,
£22.50/$35, ISBN 0226744108
IN 1844 a bombshell hit Britain. It was Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation, a book proclaiming that all of nature could be explained as
the product of “development”. The Universe began, it said, as a gaseous mass,
and then, under regular, immutable and unbroken natural law, all
else—humanity included—emerged. This is, of course, the theory of
evolution by another name, and not even the first at that. Notably Jean Lamarck
and Erasmus Darwin had been this way before, but had been seen off…
