 Darwin had retained his own conclusions on human evolution quietly in the background while the defense of his general theory was conducted by advocates as diverse as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) in England, Asa Gray (1810–88) in the United States, and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) in Germany. Darwin’s own position on the “human question” remained unclear, and his rhetorical situating of the Origin within a tradition of divine creation by secondary law, captured in the frontispiece quotations from William Whewell and Francis Bacon, retained in all editions, in some degree allowed many before 1871 to see Darwin as more open to religious views than those of some of his popularizers.