Introducing the <em>Atlantic</em> Archive
In the summer of 1860, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray published in The Atlantic a sympathetic, though tentative, defense of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” which was then provoking anxiety among theologians and scientists alike.
“The Darwinian theory, once getting a foothold,” Gray wrote, “marches boldly on, follows the supposed near ancestors of our present species farther and yet farther back into the dim past, and ends with an analogical inference which ‘makes the whole world kin.’”
The geologist Louis Agassiz, Gray’s Harvard colleague—and, soon enough, colleague as well (the magazine’s masthead at the time being more or less coterminous published Agassiz’s anti-Darwin manifesto, “,” in January 1874, a month after the geologist’s death. “His concise and effective phrases,” Agassiz wrote, “have the weight of aphorisms and pass … for principles, when they may be only unfounded assertions. Such is ‘the survival of the fittest.’”
