A riposte to Darwin
MIVART, St. George On the Genesis of Species. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1871.
8vo. Original burnt sienna cloth; pp. 314, [10, ads], numerous text illustrations; cloth mottled and spine sunned, very good.
First US edition. Scarce. This was the riposte to Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Mivart, once a member of the great naturalist's inner circle but now an outsider due to his inability to reconcile natural selection with his Catholicism. Its provocatively imitative title is a sign of the bitterness that now existed between the two camps, especially after Mivart's vicious review of Descent of Man in The Quarterly Review, No. 131, July 1871: "…in our judgment the author of the 'Descent of Man' has utterly failed in the only part of his work which is really important." This book was the most systematic and rational attack on Darwinism yet, and the one that Darwin took most seriously. One of Mivart's main objections was that natural selection failed to explain the presence of incipient structures, such as wings, before they become useful. Darwin devoted a whole chapter in the sixth edition of Origin, published in 1872, to a carefully argued rebuttal of Mivart's allegations. He had, in fact, turned Mivart's objections to his advantage by using them to further clarify his vision.
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