Mencken on Darwin

If Darwin had printed "The Origin of Species" as a serial running twenty or thirty years he might have found himself, at the end of it, a member of the House of Lords or even Archbishop of Canterbury. But he disgorged it in one stupendous and appalling dose, and in consequence he alarmed millions including many of his fellow scientists, and got an evil name.  To this day, though all of the soundest (and thus most revolutionary) of his ideas have become platitudes, he continues to be thought of much as Simon Legree, Thomas Paine and John Wilkes Booth are thought of.  To name a new public school after him would cause almost as grave a scandal as to name it after Lillian Russell. In at least two thirds of the American States one of the easiest ways to get into office is to denounce him as a scoundrel.
 But by the year 2030, I daresay, what remains of his doctrine, if anything, will be accepted as complacently as the Copernican cosmography is now accepted. His offense was simply that he was too precipitate.

H.L. Mencken from the Baltimore  Evening Sun, April 6 1931