The English writer and critic Samuel Butler was the author of the satirical novels The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon, and Erewhon Revisited, as well as several discussions of philosophical biology and the theory of evolution. He was the son of the Reverend Thomas Butler, whom he depicted as a domestic tyrant in The Way of All Flesh. Butler was sent to Cambridge by his father in the hope that he would become a clergyman, but after graduating he refused to take orders because of doubts about the Christian creed. In 1859 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he became a successful sheep farmer and for a time a convert to Darwinism. Returning to England in 1864 with enough money to live on, he began a career as an author, painter, and musician. The subject of evolution continued to occupy his mind for many years. It...