Charles Darwin | On the Origin of Species, 1859, first edition, original cloth

Charles Darwin

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859

8vo, FIRST EDITION, folding lithographed plate, 32-page publisher's catalogue at end (dated June 1859) [Freeman's variant 3], original green blind-stamped cloth with spine in gilt [Freeman's variant b] with binder's label of Edmonds & Remnants on lower pastedown, brown-coated endpapers, front free endpaper, half-title, and title becoming detached at inner margin, 1 inch repaired tear at upper margin of p.133, adhesive residue from removed bookplate on front pastedown, splitting at hinges, head of spine repaired, extremities slightly rubbed

FIRST EDITION OF "THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SCIENTIFIC WORK OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY" AND "THE MOST IMPORTANT BIOLOGICAL WORK EVER WRITTEN" (Horblit; Freeman). After five years as a naturalist aboard the survey ship H.M.S Beagle, Darwin assimilated his research and observations into the essential formulation of his theory of natural selection—yet On the Origin of Species would not appear until over two decades later. Indeed, Darwin may not have published his revolutionary theory during his lifetime, had Alfred Russel Wallace not independently come to a nearly identical conclusion about the transmutation of species. After the Linnean Society read and jointly published Darwin and Wallace's preliminary expositions of the theory of evolution (see lot 76), Darwin rushed to prepare for publication an epitome of the "big species book" that he had been working on since 1856.

Originally conceived as a work that might be printed on four or five sheets of paper, On the Origin of Species evolved during the eight months of its writing into a volume of nearly 500 pages. Darwin's first suggestion for a title, "An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection", was rejected by his publisher as too tentative and obscure. The final scope of Origin of Species prompted Darwin to abandon plans for his "big book," although he salvaged much of the first part of the manuscript for The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in 1868.

Bern Dibner's Heralds of Science describes On the Origin of Species as "the most important single work in science." The entire text is essentially an introduction to, and amplification of, the iconoclastic thesis that Darwin abstracts at the beginning of chapter 4: "many more individuals are born than can possibly survive... [I]ndividuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind... [A]ny variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection." Origin of Species caused an immediate sensation.

Of the first edition of 1,250 copies, fifty-eight were distributed by Murray for review, promotion, and presentation, and Darwin reported that the balance was sold out on the first day of publication. Five further editions, each variously corrected and revised, appeared in Darwin's lifetime, as did eleven translations. Perhaps most significantly, On the Origin of Species inspired other scientists to take up the banner of evolution. Darwin's biographer Janet Browne credits "the ultimate triumph of evolutionary theory" to the unrelenting efforts of four of the author's friends: geologist Charles Lyell, botanist Joseph Hooker, American naturalist Asa Gray, and zoologist and anatomist Thomas H. Huxley.

In his 2002 Bradley Lecture at the Library of Congress, David Quammen noted that readers of Origin of Species, whether approaching it "as a scientific work or as an historical and literary landmark," should prefer the first edition to the five later lifetime editions, all revised by the author: "That's the book, with all its daring freshness and flaws, that initiated the most cataclysmic change in human thinking within the last four hundred years." The Preface to the published lecture, by Prosser Gifford, summarizes Darwin's enduring influence: "The evolutionary sciences now encompass the macro scale—cosmology, astronomy, geology, oceanography, paleontology, demography—and the micro scale—molecular genetics, neurobiology. The analysis of DNA enables us to trace the evolution of biological forms over millennia. Darwin's patient and painstaking observations of barnacles and finches began an intellectual transformation that now stands at the center of our understanding of ourselves and our universe."

PROVENANCE:

James Blyth, armorial bookplate; University of California, Los Angeles, library stamps to top and bottom edges of textblock and shelfmark stamped to lower margin of contents leaf; Professor Henry Andrews Sneath, acquired from Bernard Quaritch, April 1969; thence by descent

LITERATURE:

Dibner 199; Ellis/Mengel 628; Freeman 373; Garrison-Morton (1991) 220; Grolier/English 96; Grolier/Horblit 23b; Grolier/Medicine 70b; Heirs of Hippocrates 1724; McGill/Wood 310; Norman 593; Printing and the Mind of Man 344b; Waller 10786; cf. Janet Browne, Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography (New York, 2006); David Quammen, The Origin of Species: Descent of a Text, with Modification (Library of Congress, 2002); Michael Ruse & Robert J. Richards, eds., Cambridge Companion to the "Origin of Species" (Cambridge, 2009)