| |
Comment on this article
Object Lesson
The book that started it all
March/April 2009
by Leo J. Hickey
Photograph ©Mark Zurolo ’01MFA
Leo J. Hickey, professor of geology
and curator of paleobotany at the Peabody Museum, specializes in the
evolutionary history of flowering plants.
This year marks both the
bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the first
edition of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Yale is fortunate to own three
first editions; only 1,250 volumes were printed. But surely one of the
university’s greatest material treasures is this copy, inscribed by the author
himself to one of the most eminent scientists of the time, James Dwight Dana,
Class of 1833, professor of natural history and geology.
| |
Charles Darwin sent this personally inscribed first
edition of On the Origin of Species (1859) to Yale geologist James Dwight Dana.
|
The full text and even a scan of
this edition are readily accessible online, and nothing about the actual book,
from its small size and slightly yellowed pages to its embossed chrome-green
covers and Victorian stampings, seems out of the ordinary. When I saw it, it
was resting in a foam cradle on a table in the Beinecke reading room, having
been borne there from the sanctum by an acolyte librarian. It looked, if
anything, curiously fragile. And so I was surprised at the strength of my
feelings when I opened its cover to see Darwin’s handwriting on one of the
blank pages in the front.
For this is the book that shook the
world like none before it, with reverberations that continue to the present
day. At one stroke it explained the unity yet myriad diversity of the organic
world and substituted the vision of a self-perfecting system for that of a
static hierarchy whose every action was the result of the constant, willful
intervention of an all-knowing power. With Darwin’s insight that it was from
death and the struggle for existence that more perfected beings arose, the book
resolved the age-old dilemma of good and evil and paradoxically absolved God
from willing evil on his creation.
From the very beginning, neither
Darwin nor his audience had any doubts about the revolutionary nature of this
work. Indeed, its implications so troubled Darwin that he gave subsequent
editions a slightly more theistic tone. Yet his theory, expressed in clear and
majestic prose, would stand the test of skeptical evaluation and transform our
worldview. The true power of this little book comes into full focus in its
final sentences:
Thus, from the war of nature, from
famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,
namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is
grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved.  |
|
