1896. Poulton, Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, whose admiration of Darwin's work verged on idolization, venerated natural selection in historical essays about Charles Darwin and evolutionary thought. Several works took this approach including this one, Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection. In this book Poulton described the Origin of Species as incomparably the greatest work the biological sciences had seen. Critics of natural selection, Poulton contended, had not taken the time to understand it.