The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the book of Genesis account of mankind's origin. The law also prevented the teaching of the evolution of man from what it referred to as lower orders of animals in place of the Biblical account. The law was introduced by Tennessee House of Representatives member John Washington Butler, from whom the law got its name. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 (Education) Section 1922, having been signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay. The law was challenged later that year in a famous trial in Dayton, Tennessee called the Scopes Trial which included a raucous confrontation between prosecution attorney and fundamentalist religious leader, William Jennings Bryan, and noted defense attorney and religious agnostic, Clarence Darrow. It was repealed in 1967. Provisions of the law The law, "An act prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof" (Tenn. HB 185, 1925) specifically provided: That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals. It additionally outlined that an offending teacher would be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined between $100 and $500 for each offense. By the terms of the statute, it could be argued, it was not illegal to teach evolution in respect to non-human creatures, such as that apes descended from protozoa or to teach the mechanisms of variation and natural selection. The bill also did not touch on, or restrict the teaching of prevailing scientific theories of geology or the age of the Earth. It did not even require that the Genesis story be taught, but prohibited solely the teaching that man evolved, or any other theory denying that man was created by God as recorded in Genesis. However the author of the law, a Tennessee farmer and member of the Tennessee House of Representatives