Estate / Collection: The Flower Family Collection

DARWIN, CHARLES
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray, 1871. First edition, second issues of both volumes; both have the January 1871 ads. Two volumes, publisher's green cloth with blind-stamped rules, black endpapers. 7 1/2 x 5 inches (19 x 12.5 cm); viii, 423, [1] [16] pp. (ads); viii, 475, [1], [16] pp. (ads); half-titles in both volumes Overall a sound copy, minor soiling and rubbing to the cloth, some wear to the joints and head and tail of the spine, some separations of the endpapers at the hinges, minor toning to the text, slightly overopened.

This is the first work of Darwin's in which the word "evolution" appears (volume I, page 2), and contains Darwin's important (and then controversial) statement that the extinct ancestors of Homo Sapiens would have been classified among the primates. The work also includes an essay on sexual selection, but the primary importance is that it demonstrates how human physical and psychological traits resemble those in apes, and how mind and moral sensibility could have resulted from evolutionary pressures. Freeman 938; Garrison-Morton 170; Printing and the Mind of Man 169.