Is man an ape or an angel?
Now I am on the side of the angels.
Benjamin Disraeli, 25 November 1864
This modest exhibition was mounted by Sally Haines at the time of the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision in August 1999 to exclude the subject of evolution from the state’s science teaching requirements. The exhibition emphasizes the major strengths of the Department of Special Collections in the area of Natural History and because of his direct involvement in the Scopes trial, the writings of H.L. Mencken. Readers are invited to visit the library and discover the riches of our holdings.
Because of its enormous social impact, Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection is probably the most
influential book in the history of the natural sciences. Its publication
aroused controversy around the world, both scientific and religious, from
scientist and non-scientist alike. The theory of evolution can be traced
to the ancient Greek belief in "the great chain of being," but
it was Darwin who provided the concept of natural selection, the mechanism
by which new species evolve through the ages, and made that concept palatable
to the scientific community.
Over the dozen years following the first publication of On the Origin
of Species, Darwin constantly revised his text, bringing out five
more editions, culminating with that of February 1872—for a combined
total of around 12,000 copies printed. The Spencer Library holds the 1st,
2nd, 3rd, and 5th editions, as well as the 6th in an 1878 reprint. In
addition, the Library has the first edition of The Descent of Man,
and a number of other of Darwin's works, including records of his voyage
on H.M.S. "Beagle" to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s.
The letter below was written nine days before the death of the writer, Charles Darwin, on 19 April 1882, and may well be his last scientific communication. It does not appear among his published letters, and only finally appeared in print in the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 48, no. 3, 1945. The recipient, James E. Todd, was a professor of natural science at Tabor College in Iowa when his paper, referred to in the letter, was published in The American Naturalist. From 1907 until his death in 1922 Professor Todd was on the geology staff at KU.
INHERIT THE SOUTH WIND (Kansa or Kanza: "People of the South Wind")
The play Inherit the wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is a fictionalized account of the 1925 "Scopes monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee. John T. Scopes, a young school teacher, was arrested for teaching the Theory of Evolution— the charge read that he "did willfully teach . . . a certain theory or theories that denied the story of the divine creation in the Bible, but did teach instead . . . that man is descended from a lower order of animals . . . ." This copy of the play is from the Library's outstanding collection of books by and about H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, the journalist, essayist, and satirist, most of which is the gift of Elizabeth Snyder. Mencken covered the Scopes trial for the Baltimore Sun, and is represented in the play as E.K. Hornbeck.
". . . Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre. It is not 1925. The stage directions set the time as 'Not too long ago.' It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow."
From the authors’ preamble to Inherit the Wind 
From the play itself:
Cates [the defendant, a teacher]: All it says is that man wasn’t just stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living comes from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days.
Drummond [counsel for the defense]: Darwin moved us forward to a hilltop, where we could look back and see the way from which we came. But for this view, this insight, this knowledge, we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis.
From the holdings of
the Department of Special Collections
KENNETH SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
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