The best-known naturalist — with apologies to Sir David, a friend of the bookshop — must surely be Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Born into a distinguished scholarly family, he set out at the tender age of 22 as a supernumerary gentleman-naturalist (read: completely surplus to purpose, but with his passage paid for) aboard HMS Beagle under the command of Robert FitzRoy on 27 December 1831. This resulted in his first book,[1] the Journal of Researches (here present in its first American edition, with a distinguished provenance). Over the following decades he rose to be the Great Man of natural science, a British counterbalance to Humboldt and just as revolutionary.

 

He is famed, of course, for positing the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection — “certainly the most important biological book ever written,” per Freeman — which so electrified the thinking public that its initial run of 1,250 evaporated on the day of publication (24 November 1859). Our example from fifth thousand — priced at 1/17^th of what a first will cost you — has some revisions, as well as an interesting Manx provenance.

 

Yet Darwin put aside a great deal of his ordinary research and writing to produce the Origin as well as the Descent of Man, the great popularizing presentation of evolution. Indeed, Darwin saw his intellectual bona fides diminished in the eyes of the scientific community precisely because the public seized upon it with such alacrity. For much of his latter career he worked to publish his “smaller” works, which he felt had more scholarly merit. They were, naturally, deeply unpopular. The 1868 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (ours a rather lovely first issue of the first edition) is Darwin’s longest work, and a fascinating evolution (sorry) of the long history of manuals of husbandry, of which our earliest example dates to ca. 1540.

 

Given the subject of my doctoral thesis — on the naturalistic expression of emotions in late Archaic and early Classical Greek art — it should come as no surprise that my favorite of Darwin’s works is his 1872 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which refutes the idea that humans and other animals have “significative muscles,” i.e., structures whose sole or primary purpose is to communicate emotion. He builds on the photographic studies of Duchenne de Boulogne, who isolated facial muscles using electrodes, to show that emotional expression is incidental to animal physiology — something we’d all do well to remember.

 

Darwin’s 1877 Various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects is perhaps the most elegant demonstration of synergistic evolution: the way the flowers and their pollinators interacted — showing the close connection between evolution and game theory — in their “parallel” courses of evolution. It was in some senses this line of inquiry that developed into the Origin; it was begun as early as 1838 but put to one side for nearly forty years. Darwin wrote to Murray, his publisher, “I think this little volume will do good to the ‘Origin’, as it will show that I have worked hard at details” (24 September 1861). Our volume comes from the library of George Basalla, professor emeritus of the history of science at the University of Delaware, whose 1989 Evolution of Technology brings Darwinian evolutionary theories into the electronic era.

At the risk of banality, Darwin is a good prose stylist; it’s worth reading his writing both for an unfiltered account of his ideas about the natural world but also for sheer enjoyment. That said, if it’s pictures you prefer, we do of course have cabinet cards of the grey wizard himself as well as “Darwin’s bulldog,” Prof. Thomas Henry Huxley…