ABSTRACT
In January 1864 John Lubbock began a series of public lectures at the Royal Institution on ‘The Antiquity of Man’, based on his published archaeological work. The high profile debates surrounding Darwin's The Origin of Species had made the London public hungry for scientific education and Lubbock, Huxley and Tyndall were all performing to packed halls; Lubbock on archaeology and ethnology, Huxley on zoology and evolution, and Tyndall on physics. Science was defining the spirit of the age, and it was increasingly to the men of science rather than to the clergy that people turned to for an explanation of the world and their place within it. The previous year, Charles Kingsley had written to his fellow liberal clergyman, Frederick Maurice, that:
The state of the scientific mind is most curious; Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact …. 1
