On the Origin of Species

The argument is in four steps, and Darwin lays them out slowly enough that a reader without training can follow every one: more individuals are born than can survive; individuals of a species vary; some of that variation is inherited; and any variation that helps its bearer live to breed will therefore spread. From that, given time enough, comes the whole tree.

He opens not with wild nature but with pigeon fanciers and stock breeders, because artificial selection was what his readers already understood, and he gives a full chapter to the difficulties of his own theory before answering them. The word “evolution” is not used in the first edition; its last word is “evolved”.

That first edition — published on 24 November 1859 and sold out on the day — is the text given here, complete, with Darwin’s introduction and its fourteen chapters.