Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a work of speculative natural history and philosophy published anonymously in England in 1844. It brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous scientific theories of the age.

Vestiges was initially well received by polite Victorian society and became an international bestseller, but its unorthodox themes contradicted the natural theology fashionable at the time and were reviled by clergymen – and subsequently by scientists who readily found fault with its amateurish deficiencies. The ideas in the book were favoured by Radicals, but its presentation remained popular with a much wider public. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria in 1845. Vestiges caused a shift in popular opinion which – Charles Darwin believed – prepared the public mind for the scientific theories of evolution by natural selection which followed from the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.

For decades there was speculation about its authorship. The 12th edition, published in 1884, revealed officially that the author was Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist, who had written the book in St Andrews between 1841 and 1844 while recovering from a psychiatric illness. Originally, Chambers had proposed the title The Natural History of Creation, but friends persuaded him to revise the title in deference to the Scottish geologist James Hutton, who had remarked of the timeless aspect of geology: "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end". Some of the inspiration for the work derived from the Edinburgh Phrenological Society whose influence reached a climax between 1825 and 1840. George Combe, the leading proponent of phrenological thinking, had published his influential The Constitution of Man in 1828. Chambers was closely involved with Combe's associates William A.F. Browne and Hewett Cottrell Watson who did much to spell out the materialist theory of the mind. Chambers died in 1871 and is buried in the grounds of St Andrews Cathedral, within the ancient chapel of St Regulus.