[On the Origin of the Species] O proiskhozhdenii vidov v tsarstvakh zhivotnom i rastitel'nom putem estestvennago podbora rodichei.

£7,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very rare: the first Russian edition of “the most important biological book ever written” (Freeman). It was translated into Russian by Sergei Aleksandrovich Rachinskii, professor of botany at Moscow University. Unusually for the time, the work appeared without any annotations or explanatory notes by Rachinskii, which was commented on in contemporary reviews of the translation. Instead, he has included Darwin’s introduction to the 1860 first American edition. “Although not a masterwork of translation, the book sold out so quickly that in 1865 it went through a second printing. By this time Darwin’s ideas had reached not only scientists and popularizers but also persons eager to integrate evolutionary thought into ideologically oriented writings. M.A. Antonovich in Contemporary greeted Darwin primarily as a master of scientific thought destined to cause drastic changes in the world outlook of the new generation. He viewed the Origin as a major victory for the democratic spirit of the scientific method over the authoritarian sway of metaphysical speculation. He left no doubt about his firm belief in the close interdependence of science and democracy. The strengths of the Origin , as he saw them, were not only in the emphasis on the natural causation of organic evolution but also in the lucidity of its prose and the power of empirical documentation on which it rested. In Darwin’s evolutionary idea and the current triumph of the experimental method in physiology he saw the beginni

• Printing: later

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