for libraries", extensively revised to deal with errors and incorporate the latest science, such as the detail of the Orion Nebula revealed by Lord Rosse's giant telescope. Use of generous spacing and the additional text extended the book by 20%, and the price had to be increased from 7s.6d. to nine shillings. The identical text was used for the long-awaited people's edition, which was smaller with cheap bindings, smaller lettering and more closely spaced text. The cheap edition was printed first, but set aside until after the gentlemen's edition was published so that it would appear as a reprint of the expensive 6th edition, and not the other way around. The price was only 2s.6d. and five thousand copies were issued, almost as many as the first four editions combined. It sold well, though sales of the expensive edition were slow. Sedgwick added a 400+ page preface to the 5th edition of his Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge (1850), including a lengthy attack on Vestiges and theories of development in general. Among religious criticisms, some maintained that Chambers' use of "natural law" to explain the creation of the planets and the successive creation of new species, including man, excluded the possibility of miracles and providential control. In other words, under this scheme, God did not personally interact with His creation after bringing forth these initial Laws. For these critics, this was akin to denying the central miracle of Christianity and, therefore, Christianity itself. Influence and effects Darwin and Vestiges Among the early readers of Vestiges, Charles Darwin had conceived his own theory of natural selection to explain evolution six years earlier, and in July 1844 had written down his ideas in an '"Essay". For a year he had been tentatively discussing his evolutionary ideas in correspondence with Joseph Dalton Hooker, who wrote to Darwin on 30 December 1844 that he had "been delighted with Vestiges, from the multiplicity of facts he brings together, though I do [not] agree with his conclusions at all, he must be a funny fellow: somehow the books looks more like a 9 days wonder than a lasting work: it certainly is "filling at the price".— I mean the price its reading costs, for it is dear enough otherwise; he has lots of errors." Darwin had read the book in November, finding that it drew on some of the lines of evidence