DARWIN, Charles Robert. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: William Clowes and Sons for John Murray, 1876.
8vo. Original green cloth, boards with blind-ruled borders, spine titled in gilt, brown endpapers; pp. xxi, [1 (blank)], 458, folding lithographic plate by W. West; slight crease to spine, overall a fresh copy in the bright original binding.
Sixth edition, eighteenth thousand. The first issue of the final definitive text, the bibliographer noting that the last corrections in this issue are “slight but undoubtedly those of Darwin himself”. It is also one of the scarcer issues of the work, there being only 1,250 copies printed - “this number is as small as any, being equalled only by that of the first edition”. Freeman goes on to point out that the significance of this issue was long overlooked and that it was, and still is, “remarkably hard to come by”. "The sixth edition, which is usually regarded as the last, appeared in February, 1872. Murray's accounts show that 3,000 copies were printed [i.e. the 11,000th-13,000th thousands] [...] It is again extensively revised and contains a new chapter, VII. This was inserted to confute the views of the Roman Catholic biologist St George Mivart. The edition was aimed at a wider public and printed in smaller type, the volume shorter again and giving the general impression of a cheap edition, which at 7s.6d. it was" (Freeman, p. 79); it was an edition intended for a mass market -- indeed, Darwin had heard that a group of Lancashire workmen had clubbed together to buy a copy -- and Darwin "realised that there were more markets to penetrate, more audiences to reach" (Browne II, p. 354).
Apart from the change of the title to The Origin of Species, and the addition of a glossary, compiled by W.S. Dallas, the sixth edition is notable as that in which "the word `evolution' occurs for the first time. It had been used in the first edition of The descent of man in the previous year, but not before in this work. `Evolved' had been the last word of the text in all previous editions, but `evolution' had been omitted, perhaps to avoid confusion with the use of the word by Herbert Spencer or with its more particular embryological meaning. The word had however been used in its transformist sense by Lyell as early as 1832 (Principles of Geology [...]). In this edition it occurs twice on page 201 and three times on page 424" (Freeman, pp. 79-80).
Freeman 401.
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