Special Collections
Book of the Month, September 2009
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
Charles Darwin
London: J. Murray, 1859
[S.L.] I [Darwin – 1859]
Charles Darwin realised in 1837, after returning from his journey in the Beagle, that evolution explained the origin of species. A year later, reading Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, he saw that natural selection brought about evolution. He began to write about the origin of the species as a projected three-volume scientific work in 1856. The discovery in 1858 that Alfred Russel Wallace had reached the same conclusions as he had made Darwin change tack and write an abstract, directed at the general reader, instead – namely, The Origin of Species.
First published on 14 November 1859, The Origin of Species sold out immediately. By 1872, it had run through six editions, and it has not been out of print since. Contested at the time of its publication – welcomed by such scientists as Charles Lyell, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley, but opposed by old-fashioned scientists like Adam Sedgwick and by some Christian fundamentalists – it has remained controversial.
Charles Darwin arranged before publication for John Murray, the publisher, to send out many complementary copies. The copy displayed is one of them, inscribed ‘From the author’ on the front free endpaper and ‘Revd John Innes’ on the title page. Innes or a contemporary has annotated two pages. The copy is further individualized by a press cutting concerning a conversation between Darwin and the Duke of Argyll pasted on the back paste-down.
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