Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species
1859 · 514 pages
- Author
- Charles Darwin
- Edition
- First edition (facsimile)
- Published
- London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859
- Pages
- 514
- File
- DjVu, 11.6 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is the book in which Charles Darwin set out his theory of evolution. He had been gathering evidence for some twenty years, ever since the voyage of HMS Beagle, and was spurred to publish when Alfred Russel Wallace arrived independently at the same idea in 1858. John Murray brought the book out in London on 24 November 1859.
Darwin argues that species are not fixed but descend, with modification, from common ancestors, and that the main force behind the change is natural selection: in the struggle for existence, individuals with useful variations survive and leave more offspring. He builds the case step by step, starting from the breeding of domestic pigeons and moving through instinct, hybrids, fossils and the geographical spread of plants and animals, and he devotes whole chapters to the strongest objections to his own theory.
Written for the general reader rather than for specialists, the book caused an immediate stir and went through six editions in Darwin’s lifetime. It laid the foundation of modern biology.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
A facsimile of the first edition, published in London by John Murray in 1859 and printed by W. Clowes and Sons. The volume opens with epigraphs from William Whewell and Francis Bacon and a detailed contents list giving the topics of each chapter; its only illustration, the fold-out diagram of the divergence of species, sits in Chapter IV, and an index closes the book. The scan has a text layer, except on the pages of the last two chapters. The book is fully proofread on Wikisource.
How to read it
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.