Reactions to On the Origin of Species Saturday Review: argument confined to Geology, but has given me some perfectly just & severe raps on knuckles." In the third edition published on 30 April 1861, Darwin cited the "Saturday Review" article as reason to remove his calculation altogether. The December 1859 review in the British Unitarian "National Review" was written by Darwin's old friend William Carpenter, who was clear that only a world of "order, continuity, and progress" befitted an Omnipotent Deity and that "any theological objection" to a species of slug or a breed of dog deriving from a previous one was "simply absurd" dogma. He touched
On the Origin of Species disperse across oceans to colonise distant islands. By 1856, his theory was much more sophisticated, with a mass of supporting evidence. In his autobiography, Darwin said he had "gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859; and I lost nothing by it". On the first page of his 1859 book he noted that, having begun work on the topic in 1837, he had drawn up "some short notes" after five years, had enlarged these into a sketch in 1844, and "from that period to the present day I have steadily