Science

Darwin on the Origin of Species July 1860 By Asa Gray

Several months after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the Harvard botany professor Asa Gray, a friend of Darwin’s, defended the book’s controversial theory of evolution.

We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes … New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only by slow degrees …

Such being our habitual state of mind, it may well be believed that the perusal of the new book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” left an uncomfortable impression …

[But] surely the scientific mind of an age which contemplates the solar system as evolved from a common, revolving, fluid mass,—which, through experimental research, has come to regard ...