ABSTRACT
It will suit the argument here to turn to Darwin and The Origin of Species, and to leave an account of some of his predecessors until afterwards. There is even some historical justification in this apparently anti-historical procedure, since the views of many of these precursors of Darwin only became known to a general and non-technical public after Darwin’s own ideas were widely publicised. Darwin himself was partly instrumental in this process by publishing in the third and subsequent editions of the Origin a list of thirty-four authors, including his own grandfather Erasmus, who had anticipated his thoughts in some aspect or other. Many of these were previously unknown even to Darwin, and were brought to his attention by others. And although the subject of evolution was discussed in biological circles from the early 1800s and indeed even earlier, it was only in the 1860s that the real impact of evolutionary thinking was felt in other subjects, amongst them architecture, design and, as we shall see, archaeology and ethnology.
