Origin of Species: Part 11 Harvard Classics: v.11 (Origin of Species: Vol. 11 Harvard Classics (1909)) - Softcover

Darwin, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0766181774 ISBN 13: 9780766181779

Publisher: Kessinger Publishing Co, 2004

Synopsis

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

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, Amazon.com

Review

A masterful condensation. --Victorian Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing Co
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0766181774
• ISBN 13: 9780766181779
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Eliot Charles W.