ABSTRACT
Are the many species that populate the Earth individually created by the intervention of a supernatural power, or are they instead modified forms of earlier ancestors, produced by natural means? In Darwin’s time, the first view was known as the hypothesis of special creation. The second view – what we now call the hypothesis of evolution – was more normally known as transmutationism or, in France, transformisme. Darwin was not the first to suggest, nor even to provide evidence for, evolution. Indeed, later editions of the Origin begin with a ‘Historical Sketch’, where Darwin briefly runs through some of evolution’s earlier advocates, including the French naturalists Buffon, Lamarck and Geoffroy St-Hilaire. As we have seen, there were evolutionists in Britain too, such as Robert Chambers, the man who turned out to have written Vestiges of Creation, first published fifteen years before the Origin.
