On the Origin of Species

Darwin's 1859 book set out the theory of evolution by natural selection. He begins with something every farmer knew, the way breeders of pigeons, dogs and cattle change their animals over generations, and then argues that nature does the same: every species produces more young than can survive, individuals vary, and those slightly better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring. Over vast stretches of time, he shows, this slow process can explain the variety of life, from the finches and tortoises of the Galápagos to the structure of the eye, and he answers the objections he expected one by one.

Darwin had gathered evidence for more than twenty years after his voyage on HMS Beagle, and published only when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him the same idea in 1858; the first printing sold out on the day of publication. This is the text of that first edition. It hardly mentions humans, a subject he took up later in The Descent of Man. Read The Voyage of the Beagle first to see where the idea began.

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) left medical school in Edinburgh because he could not bear to watch operations, and studied at Cambridge to become a clergyman. Instead, at twenty-two, he joined the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, described in The Voyage of the Beagle, which gave him the observations of a lifetime.

Back in England he worked for twenty years at his country home in Kent before a letter from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea, pushed him to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. He went on to write The Descent of Man and books on barnacles, orchids and earthworms, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.