Descrizione

Green cloth guilt, xvi,352,32 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm, English. Second edition of 1250 copies only. *fair condition, spine slighly damaged on top and bottom and tape residue on page three, otherwise good. Much of the content of this had previously been published in the Journal of the Linnean Society of London and elsewhere. Had Darwin not chosen such genetically complex examples, he might have approached more nearly to an understanding of the laws of particulate inheritance. Like Cross and self fertilisation, it was too technical a work to command a large sale, and only about 2,000 copies were sold in Darwin's lifetime, and perhaps 4,000 before the end of the century. The first edition, of 1,250 copies, was issued on July 9, 1877, in a standard case, at a cost of 10s. 6d. It has thirty-two pages of inserted advertisements which are dated January or March. The second, again of 1,250 copies, appeared in July 1880 with a new preface which surveys the recent literature, and in which Darwin states that 'the text has been left as it originally appeared excepting that a few errors have been corrected'. This is then the definitive text, but in the third thousand of 1884 Francis Darwin added another preface which again brings the literature up to date.