Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges became an international bestseller. Its theme contradicted the natural theology fashionable at the time. Its ideas were reviled by clergymen. The ideas in the book were popular with a wider public. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria in 1845. Vestiges caused a shift in popular opinion which – Charles Darwin believed – prepared the public mind for the scientific theories of evolution by natural selection as in his On the Origin of Species in 1859.