Charles Darwin | The Descent of Man, 1871, first edition, first issue, original cloth, 2 vols, presentation copy

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray, 1871

PRESENTATION COPY ("from the author" in manuscript to front free endpaper), FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE ("transmitted" first word on p.297 of vol.1, errata on verso of title leaf to vol.2, tipped in "postscript" leaf after p.viii of vol.2), 8vo, half-titles, engraved illustrations, vol.1 with publisher's list of "Popular Works" (16pp, dated January 1871), vol.2 with publisher's list of "Standard Works" (16pp, dated January 1871), publisher's green cloth stamped in blind, spines lettered in gilt, dark blue end-papers, vol.1: joints detached and text-block split between two gatherings; vol.2: joints starting; both vols: extremities slightly rubbed, minor loss at spine ends

THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE WORD "EVOLUTION" IN ANY WORK BY DARWIN.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin "compared man's physical and psychological characteristics to similar traits in apes and other animals, showing how even man's mind and moral sense could have developed through evolutionary processes" (Norman). 2,500 copies of the first issue were published on 24 February, and sold at £1.4s. It sold quickly and the second issue was printed the following month.

"The book, in its first edition, contains two parts, the descent of man itself, and selection in relation to sex. The word 'evolution' occurs, for the first time in any of Darwin's works, on page 2 of the first volume of the first edition, that is to say before its appearance in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species in the following year. The last chapter is about sexual selection in relation to man, and it ends with the famous peroration about man's lowly origin, the wording of which differs slightly in the first edition from that which is usually quoted" (Freeman).

LITERATURE

Freeman 938; Garrison Morton 170

PROVENANCE

Sir William Henry Flower (1831-1899), surgeon, museum curator, comparative anatomist, and Director of the Natural History Museum in London from 1884. Flower was also responsible for installing the statue of Charles Darwin in the Natural History Museum in 1889: ownership inscriptions to both vols, presentation inscription to vol.1