'Can we doubt ... that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind?'

In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the Western world. His insistence on the immense length of the past and on the abundance of life-forms, present and extinct, dislodged man from his central position in creation and called into question the role of the Creator. He showed that new species are achieved by natural selection, and that absence of plan is an inherent part of the evolutionary process. The present edition provides a detailed and accessible discussion of his theories and adds an account of the immediate responses to the book on publication.

Darwin's prodigious reading, experimentation, and observations on his travels fed into his great work, which draws on material from the Galapagos Islands to rural Staffordshire, from English back gardens to colonial encounters. The present edition provides a detailed and accessible discussion of his theories and adds an account of the immediate responses to the book on publication. The resistances as well as the enthusiasms of the first readers cast light on recent controversies, particularly concerning questions of design and descent.

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Features

• Charles Darwin revolutionized our ideas about the natural world and our place in it by introducing the concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest, and his ideas still provoke controversy today.
• Editor Gillian Beer has writtten extensively about Darwin and about scientific writing in its cultural context. Her wide-ranging introduction considers the development of Darwin's ideas, the scientific context, the nature of his theories and the impact of his work on his contemporaries.
• Includes a Register of Writers referred to in the text of the Origin, a Glossary of Scientific Terms and an Index.

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1.Contents
2.Introduction
3.Postscript
4.Note on the Text
5.Select Bibliography
6.A Chronology of Charles Darwin
7.On the Origin of Species
8.Contents
9.Introduction
10.Chapter I: Variation Under Domestication
11.Chapter II: Variation Under Nature
12.Chapter III: Struggle For Existence
13.Chapter IV: Natural Selection
14.Chapter V: Laws Of Variation
15.Chapter VI: Difficulties On Theory
16.Chapter VII: Instinct
17.Chapter VIII: Hybridism
18.Chapter IX: On The Imperfection of The Geological Record
19.Chapter X: On The Geological Succession of Organic Beings
20.Chapter Xi: Geographical Distribution
21.Chapter XII: Geographical Distribution—Continued
22.Chapter XII: Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs
23.Chapter XIV: Recapitulation And Conclusion
24.Appendix 1: Register Of Writers Referred to In The Text Of The Origin
25.Appendix 2: Glossary Of Principal Scientific Terms, Added in The Fifth Edition of The Origin
26.Index

Charles Darwin

Edited by Gillian Beer.

Dame Gillian Beer is Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Her Darwin's Plots (1983; second edition 2000) was followed by Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996). More recently she has been working on Carroll's Alice books in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual controversies and a new collection of her essays on literature and science is scheduled for 2008.