Write your abstract
here.
Butler, Samuel, 1835–1902, English author. He was the son
and grandson of eminent
clergymen. In 1859, refusing to be
ordained, he went to New Zealand, where he established a
sheep farm and in a few years made a modest fortune. He
returned to England in 1864 and devoted himself to a
variety of interests, including art, music, biology, and
literature. Besides exhibiting some of his paintings (1868–
76) at the Royal Academy, he composed several works in
collaboration with Henry Festings Jones, among them the
Handelian Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata (1888). His
Erewhon, in which he satirized English social and economic
injustices by describing a country in which manners and
laws were the reverse of those in England, appeared in
1872. It brought Butler immediate literary fame. Erewhon
Revisited was published in 1901. Butler opposed Darwin's
explanation of
evolution, finding it too mechanistic, and
he expounded his own theories in Evolution Old and New
(1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning as
the Main Means of Organic Modification? (1887).