Archetypes and Ancestors

Description

How fossil animals were interpreted by rival sectors of British society, especially by pro- and anti-Darwinian factions. The ideological infighting was typified by T. H. Huxley and Richard Owen's clashes over dinosaurs, the ancestry of mammals and birds, and the kinship of mammal-like reptiles. Also discussed: William Henry Flower.--John Whittaker Hulke.--Harry Govier Seeley.--Charles Robert Darwin.--Edwin Ray Lankester.--Robert Edmond Grant.--John Phillips.--Ernst Haeckel.--St George Mivart.--William Boyd Dawkins.--William Kitchen Parker.--Herbert Spencer. First edition published by Blond & Briggs (London 1982). The sales pitch for this University of Chicago Press edition (1984, pbk 1986)--which contained minor corrections, mostly typographical--was "Biology Meets the Class War". Among the more interesting reviews: Social Studies of Science, 15 (1985), 181-200; Medical History, 26 (1982), 462-6; Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 Jan. 1983, 18; London Review of Books, 21 July-3 Aug. 1983, 11-12.

First Sentence

Mid-Victorian London was the Western world's most populous city, with almost 2.7 million people at the time of the 1851 census, and 3.9 million twenty years later.

Subjects