On the Origin of the Species: Slip-cased Edition - Hardcover

Darwin, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1848588798 ISBN 13: 9781848588790

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013

Synopsis

On the Origin of Species is a book that changed the way we think about the development of life on earth.

The author's controversial theory of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, would make him internationally famous and put the issue of evolution at the centre of a fierce debate which still rages some 150 years after the book's first publication.

This clothbound edition includes over one hundred delicately detailed and informative contemporary illustrations, many of them relating to the discoveries Darwin made during the second voyage of the research ship, H.M.S. Beagle. A truly beautiful and highly collectible edition in its own slipcase.

About this title

Review:

It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.

To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Book Description:

Jim Endersby's major new scholarly edition debunks some of the myths that surround Darwin's book, and expores how it was originally written, published and read. Endersby provides a new, up-to-date and very readable introduction to this classic text and a level of scholarly apparatus unmatched by any other edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing Limited
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1848588798
• ISBN 13: 9781848588790
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384