HUXLEY, Thomas Henry.

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Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. First edition, first issue, presentation copy, inscribed in a secretarial hand "from the author" on the half-title. Evidence is Huxley's key work, deliberately written for a non-specialist audience, and among his most influential contributions to the theory of human evolution, being the first to bring together anatomical and embryonic evidence. In the Origin of Species, Darwin carefully avoided the implications of his theory for humanity, but Huxley boldly brought them to the fore. In the early 1860s, Richard Owen had asserted that human and ape brains were fundamentally different, and that the hippocampus minor was exclusively found in humans. In Evidence, Huxley uses extensive dissectional evidence to disprove this, emphasizing the human-ape commonality and relying on Darwinian evolution for his theoretical underpinnings. The work was also among the first to publicize the discovery of Neanderthal man.The first issue prints the frontispiece on the verso of the second leaf, forming an integral part of the preliminaries, and the "Advertisement to the Reader" appears on the recto of the fourth.

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