Darwin caricature. The British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in an 1881 cartoon published in the 1882 almanac for the satirical magazine Punch. Darwin's theory of evolution was published as On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection (1859). It caused a storm of controversy with Christian orthodoxy, as it contradicted the widely accepted belief that different animal and plant species were created by a divine creator (God). The title of this cartoon is referring to Darwin's recently published work 'The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms' (1881). The images refer to the evolution from chaos (lower left) through worms to monkeys to humans.