** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** November 19, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Auditorium. Angela Smith, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, and a 2014 Research Fellow at the Linda Hall Library. Fifteen years before Charles Darwin’s famous Origin of Species helped convert most naturalists to the idea of transmutation, the evolutionary treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation ‘prepared the ground’—with no name on the title page. Vestiges was read and discussed by tens of thousands of people in both Britain and America, including most prominent men of science, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, and the future President Abraham Lincoln, creating, as historian James Secord has demonstrated, quite a ‘Victorian sensation.’ Unlike Origin, though, Vestiges presented a religious cosmology more so than a scientific theory, and its author argued that his main intention had been to show that “the mode” of God’s working was only through natural law. Though practically written out of popular history by Darwin’s success, much of what the early Victorians believed about evolution came from the mysterious “Mr. Vestiges,” the Scotsman Robert Chambers. Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.

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