On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published by John Murray in London on November 24, 1859. The first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the day of publication. The book advanced a single, devastating argument: species are not fixed creations but mutable populations that change over time through a process Darwin called natural selection — the differential survival and reproduction of individuals that are better adapted to their environment. Given enough time, this process could account for the entire diversity of life on Earth without invoking a creator.
Darwin had developed the theory over twenty years, from 1838 when he first read Malthus’s Essay on Population and saw how competition for limited resources could drive evolutionary change. He delayed publication for reasons that remain debated — fear of controversy, desire for more evidence, the death of his daughter Annie in 1851, which shattered his remaining religious faith. What finally forced his hand was a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, containing an independent formulation of natural selection. Faced with the possibility of losing priority, Darwin wrote The Origin in thirteen months — a compressed, persuasive summary of the evidence he had been accumulating for two decades.
The Argument
The book’s structure is a masterpiece of scientific rhetoric. Darwin begins with artificial selection — the deliberate breeding of domestic animals and plants — to establish the principle that variation exists and can be directed. He then introduces natural selection as the same process operating in nature, without a breeder. The middle chapters address objections: the imperfection of the geological record (which he acknowledges honestly), the problem of complex organs (the eye), the sterility of hybrid species, and the difficulty of explaining instinct. The final chapters present the evidence from geographic distribution, morphology, and embryology that supports the theory.
Darwin’s prose is patient, cumulative, and extraordinarily persuasive. He does not declaim or lecture; he argues, building his case from a multitude of small observations until the reader is compelled to agree. The famous last paragraph — “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one” — is one of the great passages in English scientific writing.
Impact and Reception
The response was immediate and polarized. Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) championed the theory; Richard Owen attacked it; the Bishop of Oxford debated it with Huxley at a famous British Association meeting in 1860. But within a generation, the basic fact of evolution was accepted by the scientific community, even though the mechanism of natural selection remained controversial until the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s united Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics.
Collecting On the Origin of Species
First edition (John Murray, London, 1859): Green cloth binding, blind-stamped.
Market values:
- First edition, first issue (errata on p. ii), fine: $200,000–$500,000
- Very good: $100,000–$250,000
- Good (rebacked, foxed): $30,000–$80,000
- Second edition (January 1860): $5,000–$15,000
- Third–sixth editions (1861–1872): $1,000–$5,000 depending on edition and condition
The first edition of The Origin is one of the most valuable books in the history of science. Only 1,250 copies were printed, and surviving copies in original cloth with a clean interior command extraordinary prices.