For H.A. Reid, the secretary of the State Academy of Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa, evolution and Creation fit perfectly together. Writing in the Kansas City Review of Science and Industry in 1881, Reid echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson that it was impossible to look at the natural world and not see evidence for some kind of Creator;

The very nature and constitution of the human mind is such, that no man can talk or even think about his own existence and that of the visible world of objects around him, without assuming, even though he may deny it in words, the idea and the fact of a Great First Cause — or, as Herbert Spencer now phrases