Time and Life: Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species"

"Time and Life: Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of Species'" by Thomas Henry Huxley is a deep exploration into the connection between the vastness of geological time and the evolution of life during a time when biology was rapidly changing, focusing on the author's ideas about how the earth's history provides the setting for the story of evolving species, especially as it relates to Darwin's work on natural selection. The work challenges the common ideas about how the past is different than the present by looking through fossil records to infer how characteristics in organisms stay the same over millions of years, and proposes that species change slowly as a result of environmental pressures. Huxley combines the fields of geology and biology to argue that life develops through slow, steady modifications rather than sudden transformations.