Description
“WITH THE RESPECTS OF THE AUTHOR”: VERY RARE PRESENTATION FIRST EDITION OF CHARLES DARWIN’S FORMS OF FLOWERS, 1877, INSCRIBED BY DARWIN
DARWIN, Charles. The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species. London: John Murray, 1877. Octavo, original green cloth gilt. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.
Very rare and desirable inscribed presentation first edition—one of only 1250 copies printed—of Darwin’s volume on botany and genetics, inscribed by Darwin on the title page: “With the respects of the Author.” Most unusually for a Darwin presentation, the inscription is in Darwin’s own hand rather than written by one of publisher John Murray’s clerks.
As Oliver Sachs writes, the story of Darwin’s life often seems to climax with the publication of the Origin in November 1859, “and has a sort of elegiac postscript: a vision of the older and ailing Darwin, in the twenty-odd years remaining to him, pottering around his gardens at Down House with no particular plan or purpose, perhaps throwing off a book or two, but with his major work long completed. Nothing could be further from the truth…[His garden and greenhouses] became engines of war, from which he would lob great missiles of evidence at the skeptics outside—descriptions of extraordinary structures and behaviors in plants very difficult to ascribe to special creation or design—a mass of evidence for evolution and natural selection even more overwhelming than that presented in the Origin… this botanical work encompassed six books and seventy-odd papers… The Origin was a frontal assault (delicately presented though it was) on creationism, and while Darwin had been careful to say little in the book about human evolution, the implications of his theory were perfectly clear… The evolution of plants, Darwin sensed, might seem less relevant, or less threatening, than the evolution of animals, and so more accessible to calm and rational consideration… Darwin found in his botanical work the strongest evidence for evolution and natural selection. And in doing so, he transformed botany itself from a purely descriptive discipline into an evolutionary science. Botany, indeed, was the first evolutionary science, and Darwin’s botanical work was to lead the way to all other evolutionary sciences” (Oliver Sachs, The River of Consciousness).
His Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species grew out of Darwin’s his experiments with cross-pollination, leading to discoveries of hybrid vigor and particulate inheritance. “Darwin noticed that in some species flowers differ by the lengths of their anthers and styles, like the primroses, which show two conditions, or loosestrife, which shows three. This is also an adaptation for cross-pollination, and these observations formed the basis of Different Forms of Flowers. The problem continued to fascinate him, and he raised two large beds of seedlings of Linaria vulgaris, the one cross-pollinated and the other self-pollinated, all from the same plant. ‘To my surprise, the crossed plants when fully grown were plainly taller and more vigorous than the self-fertilized ones.’ Darwin had experimentally discovered and demonstrated the fact of hybrid vigor, or heterosis, which is completely explained by Mendelian genetics” (DSB). Darwin wrote of his experiments, “I do not think anything in my scientific life has given me so much satisfaction as making out the meaning of the structure of these plants” (Oliver Sachs). Complete with 32-page publisher’s catalogue bound at rear, dated March, 1877. (There was only a single issue, with advertisements dated either January or March.). Freeman 1277. Owner ink stamp and signature, a few penciled annotations to front flyleaf (blank). Small binder’s ticket on rear pastedown. The modern Dutch ownership inscription in this copy (“Willem Overmars, herfst [autumn] 1985”) is interesting, and hints that the original recipient may have been Dutch. The only Dutch scientist on the list of copies for presentation made by Darwin was Pieter Harting (1812-85), the noted zoologist, who had been one of the first Dutch scholars to accept the theory of evolution.
Interior clean, only slight rubbing to extremities of clean cloth, gilt bright. A very nearly fine copy, exceptionally rare and desirable with a presentation inscription in Darwin’s own hand.
