The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

About this book

A reprint of a classical work in the Cambridge Library Collection.

This sixth edition of The Origin of Species was published in 1876. It is the last edition on which Darwin himself worked before his death in 1882, and offers a useful complement to the 2009 scholarly edition, edited by Jim Endersby and published by Cambridge University Press in Darwin's bicentennial year. The sixth edition contains a 'historical sketch' in which Darwin reviews the many works by eminent European and American scientists – beginning with Lamarck in 1801 – in which ideas of evolutionary species change and of natural selection were touched on but not developed. This edition, like all from the second onwards, contains the words 'by the Creator', controversially added to the famous last sentence in the book: 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one...'

Contents

Additions and corrections to the sixth edition
Historical sketch
Introduction

1. Variation under domestication
2. Variation under nature
3. Struggle for existence
4. Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest
5. Laws of variation
6. Difficulties of the theory
7. Miscellaneous objections to the theory of natural selection
8. Instinct
9. Hybridism
10. On the imperfection of the geological record
11. On the geological succession of organic beings
12. Geographical distribution
13. Geographical distribution continued
14. Mutual affinities of organic beings, morphology, embryology, rudimentary organs
15. Recapitulation and conclusion

Glossary of scientific terms
Index

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