Popular misconceptions of Charles Darwin were in no way allayed by last year's publication of A.N. Wilson's Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker. For Wilson, Darwin was a merciless careerist who drew upon the ideas of others without giving due credit to his theory's origins. Moreover, the creationist echoes of Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler abound in Wilson's own portrayal of one of the nineteenth century's most beguiling figures. We could be forgiven for thinking, after delving deep into Wilson's world, that Darwin was a conceited, flatulent plagiarist responsible for an idea that led to the Nazi's continent-wide eugenics programme. Into such a ‘revisionary’ milieu of Darwin, the publication in the same year of J. David Archibald's Origins of Darwin's Evolution: Solving the Species Puzzle through Time and Place has appeared as a welcome breath of epistemic fresh air. Drawing upon a wealth of his protagonist's personal correspondence and published material, Archibald takes seriously Darwin's reciprocal engagement with his collaborators and critics to establish the evidential case for the evolution of species.

The Origins of Darwin's Evolution gravitates around two pivotal arguments: the first, to establish historical biogeography – the study of the history of a species through the interpretive analysis of the geographical distribution of organisms across time – as the earliest important proof of evolution by means of natural selection; the second, to argue Darwin's place among the ranks of the pioneering biogeographers of the nineteenth century, such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Hooker. To what extent does Archibald succeed at both in this book? The first point is the strongest made, yet the second leaves open questions for further investigation. Concerning the first argument, Archibald's overarching contribution does not lie within the novelty of its minutiae but rather constitutes a perceptive synthesis of current research. His historiographical foundations are clearly outlined in the preface and introductory chapter. Building upon the excellent scholarship of John van Wyhe (particularly the Darwin Online project), Gordon Chancellor, Frank Egerton, Niles Eldredge and Janet Browne, Archibald argues that even the discerning reader of The Origin of Species may overlook the importance of the four chapters Darwin dedicated to the geographical distribution of species across time and place. By overlooking the importance of these chapters, Archibald claims that it is unsurprising that reviewers may have missed the significance that historical biogeography had on Darwin's own intellectual development and early proof of evolution.

The first half of the book addresses the problematic task facing Darwin to establish an evidential basis for the mutability of species based upon geological and fossil records. The first problem we are introduced to is the lack of evidence in the fossil record to account for the mechanisms of evolution. This is due to missing gaps in the record to account for transitory links between species across time. Yet Darwin did not perceive the gaps in the fossil record to be a grave indictment of evolution, arguing that the fossil record revealed only a fragmentary history of life, not its totality. The greater problem for Darwin would lie in the field of geology and the marking of time in Earth history. We are presented in the early chapters with Darwin's exposure to geology at Cambridge by Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow, some thirty years before the publication of The Origin of Species. The importance of Darwin's exposure to geology, particularly his reading of the geology of Charles Lyell when aboard HMS Beagle, played a remarkable role in influencing the young naturalist's understanding of earth history. As Archibald discusses in a later chapter, the problem of marking the age of the Earth stood as one of the greatest challenges to the evidential case for evolution. Darwin was conscious of the great stretches of time needed to accommodate the gradual change of species via natural selection. As such he drew upon the work of Lyell and James Hutton to argue for an almost limitless earth history to accommodate the process of evolution. Yet Archibald makes clear that time was not on Darwin's side. Finding proof in the geological record for the vast lengths of time necessary for the process of evolution made for the greatest challenge that Darwin would never resolve during his own lifetime.

The first half of the book culminates in a succession of short contextual biographies of the ‘immutablists’ – a term coined by Archibald to describe the list of geologists and palaeontologists Darwin identified in Chapter 9 of The Origin of Species as the principal antagonists to evolution. The immutablists, as the name suggests, held to the ‘immutability’ of species based on the deficiencies in the geological and fossil records to account for evolution. It was the attempt to win over immutablists, most prominently Charles Lyell, that led to the development of Darwin's use of historical biogeography to provide an evidential account for evolution.

The second half of the book is dedicated to Darwin's attempts to discover long-dead species and relate them to the recently living by charting an interpretive history of the distribution of these species across time and space. Archibald focuses these later chapters on the separate observations of distinct faunal successions in the geological record, closely related fossil species on the same continent, and the recent diversification of species on isolated oceanic islands as Darwin's biogeographic proofs. He argues that taken together as a whole they allowed Darwin to claim that the mechanism of natural selection explains the great disparity and distribution of varying species across the Earth. It was Darwin's interpretive observation of the distribution of plants and animals across greatly differing geographies that Archibald argues is the historical biogeographic proof of evolution by means of natural selection.

To what extent was Darwin one of the great biogeographers of the nineteenth century? Archibald's case for this point is not explicitly made. He is clear that historical biogeography would only come to be identified as a discipline after Darwin's death. Yet a comparative history of Darwin's contribution to this burgeoning field with Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Hooker is missing from this book and would have strengthened Archibald's argument to place Darwin in the pantheon of the great nineteenth-century biogeographers. Nonetheless, Origins of Darwin's Evolution offers a comprehensive, well-written and accessible account of a relatively underexplored history of what Darwin believed to be the earliest major proof of evolution. The great strength of this book lies in bringing to life Darwin's relationship with a cast of historical characters, his own intellectual development and the observations that first lit the thought of evolution and the search to solve the species puzzle.