Eiseley and Darwin

It’s easy to look back to the first half of the nineteenth century and find many references to what eventually would be called evolution. The idea was in the air. Lamarck and his contemporaries came close to understanding it, although they were decades before geologists realized how old the earth was.
Poet Samuel Coleridge said in 1819 “a belief that has become quite common even among Christians” that the human race arose “gradually from a monkey came up through various states to be man.” History rarely notes that many people of the time were seeking a rational explanation of changes of life forms, but they were.
Loren Eiseley, in 1960, explained Darwin’s contribution to science eloquently by likening the period before Darwin to an orchestra pit prior to a performance when "individual tuning of strings, plucking of stray notes, and discordant thumpings" produced "all manner of tentative retreats and approaches, partial developments, hesitant insights and bold sounds from the wings."
“When, at last, Darwin picks up the conductor’s wand and turns this assemblage of stray notes into a full-throated performance, the world audience is swept off its feet so completely that, hypnotized by Darwin’s single figure, it forgets the individual musicians who made his feat possible.”
Nancy Sherer