The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
London: John Murray, 1874. First edition, first issue of the book in which Darwin finally gave his public account of two ideas he had withheld from the Origin of Species: the descent of Homo sapiens from pre-existing forms, and — his more original and more contested contribution — the mechanism of sexual selection. The Origin had deliberately excluded man from its argument (“light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”), and had mentioned sexual selection only briefly, as a special case within natural selection. Twelve years later, with the evolutionary argument secured in the scientific literature and the public polemics largely past, Darwin set out the two positions he had kept in reserve. The first made him famous; the second, neglected for a century, is now recognised as one of the most powerful explanatory frameworks in evolutionary biology. The twelve-year delay was not accidental. Darwin had been collecting notes on human descent since the Beagle years of the 1830s, but had withheld them for strategic reasons. He had written to Wallace in December 1857 that he would avoid the subject of man as surrounded by too many prejudices, even while admitting that it was the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist. By 1871 the climate had changed. Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) had done much of the defensive work; Lyell’s Antiquity of Man (1863) had established deep human prehistory; and Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie (1866) had pushed the evolutionary argument onto the Continent and drawn the first explicit phylogenies of the human line. The Descent therefore arrived not as an opening salvo but as the master’s own statement, delivered at a moment when the main resistance had already been absorbed. The storm that had greeted the Origin did not repeat itself in 1871; Darwin wrote to a friend that he was surprised to find everyone talking about the book without being shocked, and took this as a measure of the increasing liberality of the age. The first volume opens with a page that would prove diagnostic. On page 2, in the introduction, Darwin refers to the principle of gradual evolution — the first appearance of the word evolution in any of his published works, a year before its appearance in the sixth edition of the Origin. The word had hitherto belonged to embryology and to Herbert Spencer; Darwin had avoided it in the Origin in favour of descent with modification and natural selection, partly because evolution still carried its older sense of the unfolding of a preformed germ, and partly because Spencer’s usage had given it metaphysical baggage Darwin preferred not to inherit. That he now allowed the word onto his own page marks a small but real shift in nomenclature: from 1871 forward, the subject would be called evolution, and the Descent is where Darwin formally joined the convention he had helped to make inevitable. The first volume and the opening chapters of the second are devoted to the argument for the descent of man from a pre-existing form. The strategy is cumulative: no single piece of evidence is decisive, but each addition narrows the space of alternative explanations. Darwin begins with the homologies of bodily structure between man and the other mammals — the bones of the hand, the arrangement of the viscera, the musculature — arguing that these resemblances are inexplicable except as the signature of common descent. He proceeds to embryonic development, where he reproduces the famous side-by-side comparison of a human embryo with that of a dog (the Ecker–Bischoff figure, Vol. I p. 15), arguing that in their early stages the two are practically indistinguishable, and that embryology therefore preserves, in miniature, the shared ancestry of the vertebrate body plan. He turns to rudimentary organs — the vermiform appendix, the musculus auricularis, the coccyx, the tubercle on the outer edge of the ear — as fossil evidence carried in the living body, structures that make sense only on the assumption that they once served a function in a remoter ancestor. And he finally addresses the mental faculties, arguing from comparative psychology — the affection of dogs, the jealousy of birds, the rudimentary reason observable in the higher apes — that there is no unbridgeable gap between human and animal cognition but rather a difference of degree. The argument leans on his cousin Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), which had established, to Darwin’s satisfaction, that mental and moral qualities were inherited along the same channels as physical ones and could therefore be brought within the selective argument. The conclusion to the first part is stated with characteristic caution: that man is descended from some less highly organised form, and that the grounds upon which the conclusion rests will, Darwin writes, never be shaken. A long chapter on the races of man mounts an argument against the polygenist position — then widely held, particularly in the American anthropological literature after Morton and Nott — that the human races constitute separate species with separate origins. Darwin argues, from the fertility of crosses, from shared mental and moral characteristics, and from the continuous rather than discrete distribution of racial traits, for a single origin of Homo sapiens. His ethnographic scaffolding carries the prejudices of its period; his conclusion, however, is monogenist and anti-polygenist, and in the politics of nineteenth-century race science that was the liberal position, decisively opposed to the scientific racism then institutionalised in the American schools. The moral sense receives its own treatment. Against those who held that conscience and altruism must be divinely implanted because they could not be derived from self-interest, Darwin argues that the social instincts — present in rudimentary form throughout the higher animals — provide a natural foundation for ethics. An animal that lives in a group is selected for behaviours that sustain the group; over generations those behaviours become internalised as moral feelings. It is the earliest sustained naturalistic account of ethics in the evolutionary literature, and it is precisely the argument that Wallace, a recent convert to spiritualism, refused to accept. With the descent of man established, Darwin turns in the remainder of the second volume to his second, and originally his primary, subject: sexual selection. This is the book’s most sustained theoretical innovation. Darwin had been troubled since the 1850s by a class of biological traits that natural selection could not easily explain — elaborate male ornament, ornate plumage, antlers, display behaviours, bright colours — which often appeared to reduce the bearer’s chances of survival rather than enhance them. The peacock’s tail had become his standing example of the problem. Writing to Asa Gray in April 1860, only months after the publication of the Origin, Darwin confessed that “the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail … makes me sick.” The remark is only half a joke. It identifies the precise class of phenomena that resisted the argument of the Origin, and it locates the theoretical problem that would occupy him for the next eleven years. The solution developed in the Descent was that a second mechanism, distinct from natural selection, was at work: selection not for survival but for reproductive success, acting through mate choice and intrasexual competition. Sexual selection in Darwin’s formulation has two components. The first — male–male combat — accounts for weapons and body size: antlers, horns, spurs, large canines, the fighting armature of rival males. The second — female choice — accounts for ornament: song, colour, display behaviour, elaborate plumage. The implication was radical. Female preference, exercised generation after generation, was sufficient to drive the evolution of male traits that would otherwise be selected against. Darwin was asking his readers to believe that birds, fishes, and insects were in effect making aesthetic judgments, and that those judgments had consequences at the species level. The comparative tour that occupies the bulk of Volume II — insects (Chapters X–XI), fishes, amphibians, and reptiles (Chapter XII, containing the arresting figure of Plecostomus barbatus, a South American siluroid catfish in which the male’s mouth and interoperculum are fringed with a beard of stiff scale-like hairs of which the female shews hardly a trace), birds (Chapters XIII–XVI, by far the longest treatment, taking in courtship display, vocal performance, plumage, and the geographical distribution of ornament), and mammals (Chapters XVII–XX) — is in effect a six-hundred-page argument that this aesthetic mechanism is real, widespread, and responsible for most of the secondary sexual characters in the animal kingdom. Wallace would not accept it. The disagreement had been building for years. Darwin and Wallace had corresponded intensively through 1867 and 1868 about the coloration of female birds, the selective meaning of sexual dimorphism, and — the point that eventually separated them — whether animals were capable of the kind of preference that Darwin’s theory required. Wallace’s 1868 Westminster Review essay on ornament already hedged: he would allow that bright colour could indicate vigour but not that it could be chosen for beauty alone. In his 15 March 1871 Academy review of the Descent he broke with Darwin publicly, and in the papers that followed through the 1870s he argued that apparent ornament was really cryptic colouration or species recognition misread, and that female choice — which required crediting animals with something like aesthetic sense — was implausible. Most of the scientific community followed Wallace. Sexual selection remained a neglected and faintly embarrassing corner of Darwinism for most of a century, mentioned in textbooks as a historical footnote but rarely taken up as a research programme. It was resurrected only in the 1970s, when Robert Trivers’s 1972 parental-investment paper gave female choice a rigorous economic foundation, Amotz Zahavi’s 1975 handicap principle explained why costly ornaments could function as honest signals of genetic quality, and W. D. Hamilton and Marlene Zuk’s 1982 Science paper connected ornament to parasite resistance. Sexual selection is now one of the central research programmes in evolutionary biology, and Darwin’s six hundred pages are read as a founding document rather than a historical curiosity. The delay tells its own story: Darwin had seen further than his readers, and his readers had simply refused to follow for a hundred years. Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta Emma Darwin had read the manuscript and suggested corrections of style; in a letter of 28 March 1871 Darwin called her his very dear coadjutor and fellow-labourer, and the book’s argumentative clarity owes something to her editorial hand. The wood-engraved illustrations were drawn from life by the zoological artist T. W. Wood, whose earlier work for Alfred Russel Wallace’s Malay Archipelago (1869) had made him the best-placed draughtsman in England for the natural-history figures the Descent required; his economical, diagnostic style suited the comparative method of the second volume, where the illustrations carry much of the argumentative weight. The corrected proofs went to Murray on 15 January 1871, and the first issue of 2,500 copies appeared on 24 February, priced at £1/4/– the two-volume set. Demand was immediate: within three weeks a reprint had been ordered, and by the end of March 1871 some 4,500 copies were in print, earning Darwin close to £1,500. The religious press was hostile — the Edinburgh Review, the Dublin Review, and the Quarterly Review all published long attacks — but the scientific periodicals took the book more or less on its own terms. The most damaging review was the Quarterly’s, published anonymously in July 1871: Darwin guessed correctly that the author was St George Jackson Mivart, Huxley’s disillusioned former pupil, whose own On the Genesis of Species (January 1871) had already mounted a Catholic-metaphysical critique of natural selection. Mivart argued that the Descent would unsettle half-educated classes and licence moral relativism; Darwin felt the sting, told Huxley that he expected to be viewed as the most despicable of men, and was relieved when Huxley counter-attacked in the Contemporary Review that autumn. The episode permanently soured the Darwin–Mivart relationship and figures prominently in the 1874 second edition, where Darwin silently corrected several of Mivart’s specific objections without naming him. Translations appeared quickly: German (Carus, 1871, the two-volume Stuttgart edition that Darwin came to regard as authoritative and used when correcting his own text for later editions), Dutch (Hartogh Heys van Zouteveen, 1871–2), French (Moulinié, 1872), Italian, Russian, and Swedish all within three years of the first printing. By the time Darwin died in 1882 the Descent had reached a wider international readership than any of his other works with the sole exception of the Origin itself. Two further English issues of the two-volume edition appeared in April and December 1871, the seventh and eighth thousands, each incorporating small textual corrections; a second edition followed in 1874 in a single volume rearranged into three parts, with sexual selection in relation to man split off as Part III, a supplementary note on the brains of man and apes supplied by Huxley (pp. 199–206), a five-line errata slip, and extensive textual revisions throughout (Freeman 944). Darwin had initially intended Wallace to help him prepare the new edition but his wife Emma intervened; the editorial assistance came from their son George Darwin instead, and Darwin wrote an apologetic letter to Wallace explaining the reassignment. The present copy is the first issue of February 1871, distinguished from the second issue (March 1871, 2,000 copies) by four diagnostic features in Volume II, all of which are present and correct. First, the verso of the title leaf carries the printed errata list — seventeen corrections for Volume I and eight for Volume II — replaced in the second issue by a list of nine other works by Darwin. Second, a separately tipped-in Postscript leaf, paginated pp. [ix–x] and inserted after the Contents, on which Darwin acknowledges “a serious and unfortunate error” in his argument on sexual selection, affecting Volume I pp. 297–9 and Volume II pp. 161 and 237. Darwin had realised, too late to correct the printed text, that he had conflated two distinct phenomena: the coincidence between the onset of sexual maturity and the appearance of secondary sexual characters, which he had attributed to sexual selection, and which he now recognised was better explained by natural selection operating at a correspondingly late life-stage. The Postscript does not rewrite the passages; it flags them. Third, the verso of the Volume II half-title carries the printer’s note (William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street and Charing Cross), blank in the second issue. Fourth, the first word on p. 297 of Volume I — the opening of the passage Darwin apologises for — is transmitted, replaced by When in the second issue after the pages had been entirely reset. Both volumes retain the sixteen-page inserts of Murray’s advertisements dated January 1871. The first-issue leaves are therefore witnesses to Darwin’s thinking in the act of correcting itself, and their collective presence is the signature of a copy printed in the earliest state. Institutional copies of the first issue are securely held at Cambridge University Library (Darwin’s own copy in the Darwin Archive), the British Library, the Bodleian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Linda Hall Library, the Huntington, and the Norman Library (lot 599 in the 1998 Christie’s dispersal); auction appearances of complete first-issue sets in publisher’s green cloth are not common at the better grades, with the standard reference points the Garden 1989 Sotheby’s catalogue, the Norman 1998 Christie’s sale, and the Nordmann 2006 Christie’s Paris dispersal. Census coverage in WorldCat returns several hundred holdings for the 1871 imprint as a whole, but does not distinguish issue by record; Freeman’s four-feature collation remains the operative test for assigning a given copy to the first issue rather than to the second. The present copy carries all four features and an indistinct pencil monogram (apparently EH) at the head of the Volume I half-title, the only ownership mark in either volume; the marginal annotations and underlinings are the unsigned hand of a careful contemporary reader who worked through both volumes and who paused with particular attention at the bird and mammal chapters of Volume II. References: Freeman 937 — Garrison-Morton 170 — Norman 599 — Printing and the Mind of Man 169 — R. B. Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist (2nd ed., Folkestone, 1977), pp. 128–31 — van Wyhe, ed., The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, F937. Two volumes, 8vo (191 × 125 mm). Vol. I: pp. viii, 423, [1] + 16 pp. publisher’s advertisements dated January 1871; Vol. II: pp. viii, [ii: errata on verso of title leaf and tipped-in Postscript leaf], 475, [1] + 16 pp. publisher’s advertisements dated January 1871. Numerous wood-engraved illustrations in the text. Publisher’s original green diaper-pattern vertical-rib cloth, spines lettered and decorated in gilt with foliate ornaments at head and foot, “LONDON / JOHN MURRAY” at the foot of each spine, blind-stamped panelled boards, yellow endpapers. Faint pencil ownership monogram at the head of the Vol. I half-title, indistinct. Occasional pencil underlinings and small marginal annotations throughout — the marks of a careful contemporary reader who worked through both volumes. Rubbing and light wear to extremities and spine caps; minor chipping to a few leaf edges; foxing to text block edges and occasional light internal foxing; text block of Vol. II split at p. 161 — the page Darwin apologises for in the Postscript — but holding, and entirely unrestored. A good, honest copy in original cloth, read and annotated rather than merely shelved.
Item #6679
Price: $9,500.00
