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This Project Gutenberg EBook was transcribed by David
Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Images and supplemental text from The OpenLibrary
VESTIGES OF THE
NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION.
ELEVENTH EDITION.
LONDON: JOHN CHURCHILL, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
MDCCCLX.
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 only in its last edition, which appeared forty years after the first, was not another Darwin.
Chambers knew some geology, but little biology at first hand. As Sir Gavin de Beer puts it in his introduction to this new edition, in this book he "constructed an argument 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 editions 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.
- The Bodies of Space, their Arrangements and Formation
- Constituent Materials of the Earth, and of the other Bodies of Space
- The Earth Formed - Geological
Changes:
Lower and Upper Silurian Formations - First Forms of Life - Upper Silurian
Devonian Era - Fishes Abundant - Carbonigenous Era - Land Plants and Animals - Permian Era - Reptiles - Era of the Trias and Oolite - Reptiles Abundant - First Traces of Birds and Mammalia - Trias - Oolite - Cretaceous Era - Era of the Tertiary Formation - Mammalia Abundant - Era of the Superficial Formations - Existing Specific Forms Abundant - General Considerations respecting the Origin of the Animated Tribes
- Particular Considerations respecting the Origin of the Animated Tribes
- Hypothesis of the Development of the Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms
- Affinities and Geographical Distribution of Organisms
- Early History of Mankind
- Mental Constitution of Animals
- Purpose and General Condition of the Animated Creation
- Proofs, Illustrations, Authorities, Etc.
