DARWIN, Charles.

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On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, First edition of "the most influential scientific work of the 19th century" (Horblit) and "certainly the most important biological book ever written" (Freeman). The initial 1,250 copies of Darwin's magnum opus prompted an intellectual revolution comparable to that of Newton or Copernicus. While recognizable theories of evolution had been developing since at least the mid-1750s, the Origin introduces the critical mechanism of natural selection to explain the direction of the process. When married with Mendelian genetics, natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary theory: "every modern discussion of man's future, the population explosion, the struggle for existence, the purpose of man and the universe, and man's place in nature rests on Darwin" (Mayr, pp. vii-xxviii).

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