November 30, 1827

Victorian saltationism was a set of ideas critical  of Darwinism.  Saltationism opposed the gradualism intrinsic to Darwin's thinking, with a picture of sudden change, as an evolutionary process, and one reason for this was that "features critical to an organism's survival and reproductive competence would be useless unless they were functional from the very beginning."

A major proponent of saltationism was St. George Mivart (November 30, 1827 to April 1, 1900). Mivart, officially trained as a lawyer and MD, gained fame in an era when the positions regarding evolution were not yet rigidly fixed. Mivart wrote a book intended as a textbook titled The Cat: An Introduction to the Study of Backboned Animals, Especially Mammals, (1881). It is available here.  Mivart seems to have respected the intelligence of the cat as having complexities unavailable to man, but I am still tracking down the source of some quotations I have read.

Mivart was a convert to Roman Catholicism (1844) and his career included bringing together religion and science. One of his publications  however, the church forbid Catholics to read. Mivart's suggested that people in hell might still be saved.