In Thomas Hardy's ‘Drinking Song’ the speaker decodes Charles Darwin's ‘strange message’ with a uniquely complex blend of philosophical gravitas and darkly mischievous wit. What triggers this speaker's sardonic dismay is the possibility of a lineage reified in ‘blood’: a mysterious bond between ‘apes and men’ that survives ‘dull defacing Time’ (‘In the Night She Came’, l. 11). The phantasmagoric, visionary and uncanny components of Hardy's poetry, anchored in a radical repackaging of Darwin's scientific bequest, owes a signal though not widely canvassed debt to a late-Victorian anthropologist with a keen interest in questions of biological inheritance and ancestral memory, as well as in the ‘potential diffusion’ of consciousness and the ‘permeability’ of individual selfhood (Vrettos, 2007):

So E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) expounds the doctrine of ‘survivals’ in his two-volume work of comparative ethnography Primitive Culture (1871), published a year before Hardy's pastoral romance Under the Greenwood Tree. Tylor's anthropological coinage encompasses those venerable instances of thought or practice that had obdurately withstood what Hardy calls ‘Time's transforming chisel’ (‘The Revisitation’, l. 109), lingering into later religious observances, political institutions and kinship organisations, thus signifying cumulative growth and continuity between archaic and more advanced forms of civilisation.