 In its historical origins, Darwin’s theory was different in kind from its main predecessors in important ways (Ruse 2013b; see also the entry on   evolutionary thought before Darwin).  Viewed against a longer historical scenario, Darwin’s theory does not deal with cosmology or the origins of the world and life through naturalistic means, and therefore was more restricted in its theoretical scope than its main predecessors influenced by the reflections of Buffon, Herder, and German Naturphilosophen. It also differed from the historical developmentalism of his German contemporary, the paleontologist Heinrich G. Bronn (Gliboff 2008, 2007). This restriction also distinguished Darwin’s work more immediately from the grand evolutionary cosmology put forth anonymously in 1844 by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers (1802–71) in his immensely popular Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work which in many respects prepared Victorian society in England, and pre-Civil War America for general evolutionary theories (Secord 2000; MacPherson 2015). It also distinguished it from the theories of his contemporary Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) summarized below.