the secret with only four people: his wife, his brother William, Ireland, and Robert Cox. All correspondence to and from Chambers went through Ireland as intermediary. Content The work puts forward a cosmic theory of transmutation, which we now call evolution, as the "natural history of creation". It suggests that everything currently in existence has developed from earlier forms: solar system, Earth, rocks, plants and corals, fish, land plants, reptiles and birds, mammals, and ultimately man. The book begins by tackling the origins of the solar system, using the nebular hypothesis to explain its formation entirely in terms of natural law. It explains the origins of life by spontaneous generation, citing some questionable experiments that claimed to spontaneously generate insects through electricity. It then appeals to geology to demonstrate a progression in the fossil record from simple to more complex organisms, finally culminating in man, with the Caucasian European the pinnacle of this process, just above the other races and the rest of the animal kingdom. It connected man’s mental reasoning power with the rest of the animals as an advanced evolutionary step that can be traced back through 'lower' animals. In this sense, the evolutionary ideas offered in Vestiges aimed to be all-encompassing. It contains several comments relevant to recent debates, such as regarding Intelligent Design. For example: Not one species of any creature which flourished before the tertiary (Ehrenberg's infusoria excepted) now exists; and of the mammalia which arose during that series, many forms are altogether gone, while of others we have now only kindred species. Thus to find not only frequent additions to the previous existing forms, but frequent withdrawals of forms which had apparently become inappropriate – a constant shifting as well as advance – is a fact calculated very forcibly to arrest attention. A candid consideration of all these circumstances can scarcely fail to introduce into our minds a somewhat different idea of organic creation from what has hitherto been generally entertained. (p. 152) In other words, the fact of extinction, which can be observed in the fossil layers, suggests that some designs were flawed. From this, the author concludes: Some other idea must then come to with regard to the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic creation. (p.153) But this suggestion is not a mechanism, as Darwin would argue fifteen years later. The author merely notes that a continually active