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French writer Bernard de Fontenelle expressed the belief that there really was a man on the moon — and a whole civilisation to boot, if you please.

One might, with Darwin, theorize that the development of the biosphere was simply down to that empirically unattested variant of chance, “natural selection.”

The ideas of Ernst Haeckel, in his youth a hardline Darwinian materialist, were to evolve to a surprising degree.

This form of objection left the door ajar to the kind of “hybrid” interpretation favored by some in both Britain and America in the later Victorian period.

Darwin began casting around in his mind for supplementary theories, sometimes going so far as to reconsider evolutionary thinking he had once firmly rejected.