Nonfiction · 1859
On the Origin of Species
By Means of Natural Selection
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.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Chapter I — Variation Under Domestication
- Chapter II — Variation Under Nature
- Chapter III — Struggle for Existence
- Chapter IV — Natural Selection
- Chapter V — Laws of Variation
- Chapter VI — Difficulties on Theory
- Chapter VII — Instinct
- Chapter VIII — Hybridism
- Chapter IX — On the Imperfection of the Geological Record
- Chapter X — On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings
- Chapter XI — Geographical Distribution
- Chapter XII — Geographical Distribution—Continued
- Chapter XIII — Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs
- Chapter XIV — Recapitulation and Conclusion
- Index
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Essential Philosophy.
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About the author
1809–1882 · Victorian
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was born in Shrewsbury, studied medicine at Edinburgh and for the Church at Cambridge, and sailed as naturalist on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. The theory of natural selection took shape in his notebooks from 1837; he published it in On the Origin of Species in 1859, after Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at the same idea, and developed it in The Descent of Man (1871) and later works. He lived and worked at Down House in Kent for forty years.
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