Illustration – Mid-19th century lithograph entitled ‘Museum and Cliff Bridge, Scarboro’. The image shows most of the Rotunda (see last blog) with the headland-top Castle in the distance – the Grand Hotel had not then been built.
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, like Smith was an ardent geologist, but is better remembered as a naturalist following his five-year journey of discovery on HMS Beagle, 1831-1836, his Journals published in the late 1830s becoming best-sellers. After years of thoughtful consideration of the natural world Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. His explanation of the ‘evolutionary process’, driven by ‘natural selection’ (a term coined elsewhere), and resulting in the ‘diversity of life’ led him to firmly deny a literal interpretation of the story of Creation as told in the Book of Genesis, although in a more ethereal way he retained some elements of the Unitarian faith of his earlier years.
In the face of growing scepticism about a literal interpretation of the Bible (or at least the Old Testament) a Victorian cleric had studied the family trees evidenced in the Old Testament and had come to the conclusion, rational from the perspective of his studies, that the World was c. 4500 years old.