ABSTRACT
Scarcely twenty years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s (1809-82) Origin of Species in 1859, special creationists could name only two working naturalists in North America, John William Dawson (1820-99) of Montreal and Arnold Guyot (1807-84) of Princeton, who had not succumbed to some theory of organic evolution. The situation in Great Britain looked equally bleak for creationists, and on both sides of the Atlantic liberal churchmen were beginning to follow their scientific colleagues into the evolutionist camp. By the closing years of the nineteenth century, evolution was infiltrating even the ranks of the evangelicals, and, in the opinion of many observers, belief in special creation seemed destined to go the way of the dinosaur. But, contrary to the hopes of liberals and the fears of conservatives, creationism did not become extinct. The majority of late-nineteenth-century Americans remained true to a traditional reading of Genesis, and as late as 1991 a public-opinion poll revealed that 47 percent of Americans, and 25 percent of college graduates, continued to believe that “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”
