came practically to nothing, [1910] as regarded the general opinion,
until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience,
incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some
specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist
view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the
issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in
successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of
him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that,
"as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French
physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be
tolerated in England"; adding: "You would be surprised to hear the
contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the
Vestiges." [1911] Hugh Miller, himself accused of "infidelity" for
his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of
greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists
of his day "vermin" and "reptiles," [1912] and classifying as "degraded
and lost" [1913] all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution,
which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own
delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the
certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared
in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types
"can never be maintained again," and pronounced it an "unhallowed
imputation." [1914]