On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition [Facsimile] [Paperback]

Some idiot wrote a review of this book as if it were a contemporary scientific publication, as if Darwin were still alive to rewrite another edition! Darwin was a great writer who used his keen mind in communicating his ideas in English. It is interesting to contrast Darwin's writings to Freud's works, which were also presented as scientific, but haven't stood up to scrutiny nearly as well. Let us also apply some of the principles of selection to Amazon reviews. Feel free to review this book if you can appreciate both the historic and literary value of Dawrins works. Otherwise, please keep your opinions to yourself.

NOTE that this is a review of the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first edition of "On the Origin of Species" (intro by Ernst Mayr). This is NOT a commentary on Darwin's text.

I blithely bought and began reading the Modern Library's "Origin", then came across this facsimile of the first edition in the library. Hmm, I wondered. I used the quotations in the front of my copy to deduce that I was reading the sixth (and last) edition, rather than the first. While that, too, has its considerable interest in illustrating the twists and turns of Darwin's thought during those years, the evolution revolution was made by the first edition. As Ernst Mayr says in his introduction, "When we go back to the Origin, we want the version that stirred up the Western world, the first edition." Besides which, if one is going to do any historical research, one needs this edition, for contemporary references use the first edition's pagination.

But most importantly, this is the firstborn of Darwin's mind, long gestating, and contains his most confident and positive statement of his thesis. He had tried to anticipate all the major objections to his theory and answer them preemptively here. Still, at the time of this writing he had no critics, so the tone and content display none of that waffling that mar, to a certain extent, the final edition.

This volume was put together in 1964, and Ernst Mayr's introduction dates from that time. It is a good historical introduction to Darwin and his contribution, and some more specific remarks on the first edition, its general approach and some of its path-breaking arguments. Also included in the extra matter is a bibliography of Darwin's published works, plus current works on evolution, as of 1964. There is also a quite comprehensive index of the text, which should make the book considerably more usable to us than it was to Darwin's original readers.

My only gripe is that Harvard University Press only offers a paperback, although it used to have a hardcover edition. The paperback version is readable enough at 5.5 by 8.2 inches, yet it's too thick for its size, and, while definitely not of poor quality, vulnerable to the binding breakage typical of the breed, so serious scholars of the work might find themselves literally pulling it apart. For you and me, though, it should be just fine.

The 'Origin' went through six editions in Darwin's lifetime: the 1st and 6th are the only ones still reprinted. The 1st edition shows Darwin's thinking in its original form, before he began attempts to accommodate objections based on erroneous late-century ideas about the exact nature of heredity and the age of the Earth.

This Harvard reprint of the 1st edition, with a new cover just in time for the 150th anniversary of publications, comes complete with misprints [see p. 20 line 11 'speceies'] and a 'Just So' story [How the Bear Turned into a Whale, p. 184], and is Darwin's clearest statement of the Theory of Natural Selection. The introduction by Ernst Mayr is a major bonus as a precis of Darwin's theory and its impact on biology.

For it's price, it can be recommended over all other versions. Harvard has also issued another facsimile edition, with marginal notes by James Costa, that is valuable for the historian of ideas, and Quammen's illustrated edition [not a facsimile] is delightful.

The 6th edition has often been reprinted, on the notion that this must be the most highly developed form of the theory. It isn't, and gave us the unfortunate phrase 'survival of the fittest.' It shows up a lot in used book stores. If you're browsing, check the last sentence of the book: if it refers to 'the Creator', you're looking at the 6th edition, otherwise it's the 1st.

NB: Harvard first reprinted this in 1964, in hardcover. The binding wasn't that great. Interestingly, the original John Murray editions are not particularly well put together, though I did buy a copy of the 6th edition last summer at the International Palaeontology Congress. Holding the first edition isn't as big a thrill as you might expect: it's by no means a Gutenberg bible. Don't, as they say, judge a book by it's cover.