Life and Habit

Samuel Butler was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose works foreshadowed the collapse of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress. Butler belonged to no literary school, and spawned no followers during his lifetime.  His controversial assertions shut him out from both of the opposing factions of church and science which played a large role in late Victorian cultural life.

“Life and Habit” is a book which opens the author's ideas on evolution which he believed would supplement Darwin's work. Butler advocated the idea that much of inheritance was based on habit making a feature ingrained, to the extent that it could pass between generations and reappear in the next. An enlightening and eye opening work about the evolution will certainly appeal to everyone interested in the history of science.