SCHMIDT, Oscar.

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Darwinismus und Socialdemocratie. First edition of the first publication to describe social Darwinism, from the library of the physiologist Henry Newell Martin, with his ownership signature on the front cover. Martin was an assistant of Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog", with whom he wrote a textbook on evolutionary theory. This copy was later in the collection of the cardiologist Wallace Bruce Fye.A zoologist by training, Schmidt (1823-1886) was an early advocate of Darwin's theory of evolution and a friend of Ernst Haeckel. He was particularly interested in the place of the development of human language in Darwin's system. He extended this to investigate the political applications of the theory of evolution. "Most of Schmidt's fire in promoting social Darwinism was directed explicitly against Marx and Engels. Schmidt explored what he called 'the actual relations of sociology to Darwinism' or what might be better referred to as the social implications of Darwinism, offering this as the scientific basis for a critique of Marxian social democracy" (Foster, p. 260). The phrase "social Darwinism" was first coined in an 1877 article by Joseph Fisher, but Schmidt's paper is the first to offer an extended definition of the concept. He expanded his ideas in the English article titled "Science and Socialism" in Popular Science Monthly, published the following year.WorldCat and Library Hub record only three institutional holdings of Darwinismus und Socialdemocratie: the British Librar

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