ABSTRACT
When the Zoological Society of London launched an incentive to steer popular curiosity away from the traditional lures of wonder and marvel, its stated aim was ‘to substitute just ideas, drawn from actual observation’ for ‘wild speculations built upon erroneous foundations’.1 The transition was, of course, nothing like the straightforward matter envisaged in the Society’s information booklet, first printed in 1830. Seven centuries previously, Adelard of Bath had warned about the kind of ignorance that ‘leads into error all who are unsure about the order of things’, and by the first half of the nineteenth century a whole culture was becoming unsure about the order of things, not just through the kind of wilful ignorance Adelard was attacking, but through loss of confidence in inherited ways of knowing, and doubtful adherences to new and often clashing forms of interpretation.2 This was a culture in search of a new kind of consensual explanation of the laws and order of nature well before Darwin made his bid to provide it. Among the educated, general adherence to Biblical accounts of creation was becoming fractured, while scientific interpretations of natural history were in conflict with each other over such fundamental questions as whether species were fixed in their original forms, or whether they evolved over time.3
