The book, as far as I am aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. - Robert Chambers

This skeptical method consists very much in vicious circles. You cannot know whether a fact be a fact till you have ascertained the laws of nature in the case, and you cannot know the laws of nature till you have ascertained facts.

I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing.

Phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human.