The book was not anything special to look at. Small, with a red cover, 390 pages. A gold stamp

announced the title, Vestages of the Natural History of Creation, but inside it was packed with dynamite.

Vestages was published in 1844, an ambitious blend of every ology imaginable, biology,

anthropology, geology, even theology.

It covered everything from the origin of the solar system to the future of humankind.

Most dangerously of all, it proposed that human beings evolved from apes, long before Charles Darwin ever did.

And we know that Darwin read it, along with Queen Victoria, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale,

George Eliot, and more. It was the most controversial book of its day, and probably the most

influential book you've never heard of.

So who wrote it? That was the best part. The author was anonymous. This led to countless hours of

gossip in salons and parlors over who could have put together such a dangerous and bizarre book.

And moreover, who would have dared?

This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where

footnotes become the real story.

One Sunday around 1832, a preacher in Edinburgh, Scotland,

ascended the pulpit and began waving a magazine around.

Its title was Chambers Edinburgh

Journal. The preacher denounced it as atheistic and evil and told his followers never to read it.

Everyone applauded, except for a bearded, red-faced man in the front pew. That was Robert Chambers

himself. He grabbed his wife, stomped out,

and never returned. The 30-year-old Chambers ran the journal with his brother William, although the two

did not like each other. William was cold and calculated, Robert more hot-headed. But Chambers' journal

...