The origin of species (1891)

by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. With portrait. London : John Murray, 1891. Two volumes, octavo, original publisher’s gilt-lettered grey-green cloth (light corner wear, lightly bruised with small tears at head and foot of spine, spine lightly sunned), original navy blue chalk-surfaced endpapers; Vol. I, pp. [ii], xxvi, 366, [2] (adv., verso blank); portrait frontispiece (with tissue-guard), folding diagram; Vol. II, pp. vi, 340; glossary, index, light foxing to preliminaries. A very good set.

A very good copy of the sixth edition of one of the most important texts in the history of science. The first edition of 1859, a great rarity, is described in Freeman as “… the most important biological work ever written.”; Dibner, “… the most important single work in science.”; Printing & the Mind of Man, “… revolutionized our methods of thinking and our outlook on the natural order of things. The recognition that constant change is the order of the universe had been finally established and a vast step forward in the uniformity of nature had been taken.”

The Sixth Edition was the final edition extensively edited by Darwin and the first edition to drop the word ‘ON’ from the title and the first edition of the ‘Origin’ to use the word ‘evolution’. The Glossary was compiled by W. S. Dallas at Darwin’s request. This two-volume edition, the second in this form, it having first been issued in 1888 (Freeman 422) as the ‘Library Edition’, is a handsome work, with larger type and printed on thicker paper. The title-pages to this set are cancels, suggesting it may simply be a re-issue of the 1888 edition, and there is no indication of a ‘Library Edition’ as such, however the word ‘indigeens’ in Chapter IV has been corrected to ‘indigenes’ and the text is clearly printed from stereos, at least in part, so the reason for the cancels is somewhat obscure, and as such not noted by Freeman. Both of these two-volume issues are very seldom seen on the market, presumably being destined for libraries, and were probably produced in quite limited numbers, this issue having no ‘thousand’ designation and the original two-volume issue of 1888 sharing the Thirty-third Thousand designation with another one-volume issue having the regular pagination and small type of the one-volume sixth edition.

Freeman 437