Beschreibung:

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 1872. The sixth edition (eleventh thousand), inscribed in Darwin's hand on the half-title "From the Author/with best Regards." Publisher's pebbled green cloth, the covers stamped and ruled in blind, the spine lettered in gilt. 7 1/4 x 4 1/2 inches (18.6 x 11.7 cm); xxi, 458 pp., folding diagram. Some rubbing to binding extremities including an abraded area with a few small punctures to the upper joint, a few splits to the spine tips with a small repair at footer, the cloth of the lower joint starting to split, evidence of a faint old dampstain to endpaper extremities only, the inscribed leaf and others at beginning and end with some light foxing, in all a sound copy. The 1872 edition of Origin of the Species was the last to be revised by Darwin during his lifetime and is expanded to include a refutation of George Jackson Mivart's 1871 On the Genesis of Species. This edition is also the first to employ the word "evolution," first used by Darwin in The Descent of Man the previous year. The word is used sparingly throughout but does appear twice on page 201 (in the chapter devoted to Mivart) and three times on page 424. Copies of any edition bearing an inscription in Darwin's hand are extremely rare at auction as all known presentation copies of the 1859 first edition were inscribed in the hand of a clerk and few others have passed through the rooms. Freeman 391 ("the most important biological book ever written"); PMM 344b; Garrison-Morton 220. C