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 included evidence that he had gathered on the "Beagle" expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation. Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy