The History of Creation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868) is a book by Ernst Haeckel on the history of creation. It was translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876.
Background
Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species had immense popular influence, but although its sales exceeded its publisher's hopes it was a technical book rather than a work of popular science: long, difficult and with few illustrations. One of Haeckel's books did a great deal to explain his version of "Darwinism" to the world. It was a bestselling, provocatively illustrated book in German, titled Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, published in Berlin in 1868, and translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876. It was frequently reprinted until 1926.
Haeckel argued that human evolution consisted of precisely 22 phases, the 21st — the "missing link" — being a halfway step between apes and humans. He even formally named this missing link Pithecanthropus alalus, translated as "ape man without speech." (The missing link was what the Dutchman Eugène Dubois, discoverer of Homo erectus, would later resolve to find.)
