Sublime

special evolution entirely inoffensive. One of Darwin’s earliest and most vigorous champions, the extremely accomplished American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), was a devout Christian who saw such evolution as a manifestation of God’s creative power in the fabric of nature.

For all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact. It depended heavily upon local circumstance and the gradual evolution of specialized subcultures of contact and conquest. It was not the working-out of an inescapable economic destiny (as some historians have argued), or the inevita

My 'Descent of Man' was published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing. A

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent

But though the ‘sea states’ coped most successfully with the economic conditions of the period, their strength and importance should not be exaggerated by hindsight. Much of their overseas commercial activity was risky and unprofitable,27 as the misfortunes of the Royal Africa Company, the South Seas Company and the Dutch West India and East India