[DARWIN, CHARLES]. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1861.
THIRD EDITION (seventh thousand). Cloth-bound; hardcover; octavo (21 x 13 x 3.5 cm); pp. xix, 538, [2] publisher's catalogue. English text. Publisher's original green diagonal-wave-grain cloth; spine lettered and decorated in gilt (Freeman's variant a, no priority); covers blocked in blind; brown coated endpapers; half-title; folding diagram facing p. 123; Edmond & Remnants binder's ticket on rear pastedown; booksellers blind-stamp of M. J. Backwell, Castletown to ffep; 2 pp. publisher's advertisements at rear. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight, secure and square. A few small dark marks to covers, with toning to backstrip and slight crushing to spine ends. Interior very well-preserved, with previous owner signatures to front endpapers and title.
Notes: The important third edition of "the most influential scientific work of the 19th century" (Horblit) and "certainly the most important biological book ever written" (Freeman); a book in which Darwin explains his concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection. "The publication of the Origin of Species ushered in a new era in our thinking about the nature of man. The intellectual revolution it caused and the impact it had on man's concept of himself and the world were greater than those caused by the works of Copernicus, Newton, and the great physicists of more recent times. Every modern discussion of man's future, the population explosion, the struggle for existence, the purpose of man and the universe, and man's place in nature rests on Darwin" (Mayr, pp. vii-xxviii). Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was first published in 1859, a second edition followed in 1860. For this third edition, the text was extensively altered, and a table is produced of differences from the second edition, a feature that occurs in each subsequent Murray edition. This third edition is also notable for the addition of the historical sketch in which Darwin acknowledges his predecessors in the general theory of evolution. All copies of the third edition are marked "seventh thousand" on the title page, noting the total issue of copies from the first edition onwards. Freeman 381. Ernst Mayr, introduction to the Harvard University facsimile of the first edition, 1964.
