Caricatures of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory in 19th-century England

[4] During the 1860s and 1870s the kinship between ape and man received far more opposition than it would in the following century, with the theory of natural selection today considered a subject of universal scientific consensus.

[citation needed] Linley Sambourne drew a "wild evolutionary polonaise"[5] which spirals up from "CHAOS" and ends in the English gentleman tipping his top hat to Darwin, the latter enthroned observing the entire development from the center.

After the publication of The Descent of Man Darwin was increasingly identified with the theory of evolution although his friend Thomas Henry Huxley was the first to put it forward.

The cover of the French satirical magazine La Petite Lune is a telling example of the paradigmatic representation of Darwin in contemporary cartoons and caricatures.

The title alludes to a publication of Darwin entitled The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations of their Habits which was issued in October 1881.

This, however, conveys a reduced if not false picture of Darwin's theory in which competition, hereditary transmission, coincidence and selection play a major role.

"[10] That the earthworm is transformed into a monkey and not into another animal might indicate that the thesis of a kinship between ape and human received a wider acceptance among the British public (The Descent of Man had been published 10 years earlier).

[11] The cyclical depiction of Darwin's evolutionary theory might have been modelled on the wood engravings of the illustrator Charles H. Bennett which show transformations of humans into immobile objects and vice versa.