page_title: Edward Hitchcock
section_title: Paleontological chart
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Hitchcock / Paleontological chart
caption_attribution_description: English: This is the Paleontological Chart in the publication 'Elementary Geology' (1840) by Edward Hitchcock. It shows two trees: one for plants, one for animals.
context_page_description: Edward Hitchcock was an American geologist and the third President of Amherst College.
context_section_description: He inserted a paleontological chart in his Elementary Geology (1840). It shows a branching diagram of the plant and animal kingdom against a geological background. He referred to it as a tree. This "tree of life" is the earliest known version that incorporates paleontological and geological information.
  Hitchcock was an advocate of gap creationism. Hitchcock saw God as the agent of change. He explicitly rejected evolution and a religious six-day creation. He perceived that new species were introduced by a Deity at the right time in the history of the earth. The chart is present in all editions between 1840 and 1859. After Charles Darwin (1859) published his On the Origin of Species, a tree of life image was generally interpreted as an evolutionary tree. In the 1860 edition of Elementary Geology Hitchcock dropped the chart. In 1863 Hitchcock wrote an article in which he criticized Darwin’s theory of natural selection. After his death in 1864, his son Charles Henry Hitchcock (1836–1919) published a new edition (1870) also without a paleontological chart. Charles then published books and articles of his own.
caption: Fold-out paleontological chart of Edward Hitchcock in Elementary Geology (1840)
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