than Erasmus Darwin, the other pre-eminent scientific text with a theory of cultural transformation was advanced by Robert Chambers (1802-1871). Chambers was a Scottish evolutionary thinker and philosopher who, though he was then and now perceived as scientifically inadequate and criticized by prominent contemporaries, is important because he was so widely read. There are records of everyone from Queen Victoria to individual dockworkers enjoying his Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), including future generations of scientists. That The Vestiges did not establish itself as the scientific cutting edge is precisely the point, since the Vestiges’s influence means it was both the concept of evolution the Victorian public was most likely to experience, and the scientific presupposition laid earliest in the minds of bright young scholars. Chambers propounded a 'principle of development' whereby everything evolved by the same mechanism and towards higher order structure or meaning. In his theory, life advanced through different ‘classes’, and within each class animals began at the lowest form and then advanced to more complex forms in the same class. In short, the progress of animals was like the development of a foetus. More than just an indistinct analogy, this parallel between embryology and species development had the status of a genuine causal mechanism in Chambers’ theory: more advanced species developed longer as embryos into all their complexity. Motivated by this comparison, Chambers ascribed development to the ‘laws of creation’, though he also supposed that the whole development of species was in some way preordained: it was just that the preordination of the creator acted through establishing those laws. This, as discussed above, is similar to Spencer's later concept of development. Thus Chambers believed in a sophisticated theory of progress driven by a developmental analogy. In the mid-19th century, a “revolution in ideas about the antiquity of the human species” took place “which paralleled, but was to some extent independent of, the Darwinian revolution in biology.” Especially in geology, archaeology, and anthropology, scholars began to compare “primitive” cultures to past societies and “saw their level of technology as parallel with that of Stone Age cultures, and thus used these peoples as models for the early stages of human evolution.” A developmental model of the evolution of the mind, culture, and society was the result, paralleling the evolution of the human species: “Modern savages [sic] became, in effect, living fossils left behind by