Genre:

Diary, Spoof, Serial

Subjects:

Evolution, Darwinism, Publishing, Human Development, Creationism, Cosmology, Mesmerism, Animal Development, Zoology

    The narrator relates that he denied that he was angry at his friend Boodels's criticism of a passage in his manuscript on 'Typical Developments', and that he added, 'if he dislikes this of mine, why [Boodels] wouldn't care about Buckle's History of Civilisation, or Darwin's "Book"' (the name of which he has forgotten), as well as David Hume and Jeremy Bentham. He records that Boodles ridiculed his claim to be 'on par' with Darwin, Buckle, and Bentham, and that he later continued his writing. Amid interruptions from his bulldog he managed to write: 'Man at once possible and impossible, took his origin from the pulversation of hitherto conflicting natural particles. Man was developed, slowly, among the ruins of a mammoth world, to rule brute creation, to make the tawny lion bend before his iron will [...] to subdue, by the mesmeric authority of his intelligent eye, the stupendous elephant, the [...] rhinocerous, the untamed denizen of the primaeval jungle'. (120)

Reprinted:

Burnand 1868