Octavo. Pp. xxi, [blank], 432. Folding lithographed plate. Original publisher’s green cloth with gilt spine lettering.
Sixth Edition, with Additions and Corrections (Forty-third Thousand). First edition to use the word “evolution.”
Condition: Corners lightly rubbed; slight bruising at head and foot of spine. Original patterned endpapers, lightly foxed. Folding lithographed plate present. Contemporary owner’s inscription on preliminary blank: “P. H. Martin, Sheffield, Aug. 1894.” Several gatherings unopened. Text block clean with light age toning. An especially appealing survival, preserved in a state suggesting remarkably little use. Several gatherings remain unopened (uncut). The volume is housed in a protective Mylar cover.
Reference: Collation: Octavo. Pp. xxi, [blank], 432. Folding lithographed plate. Sixth Edition, with additions and corrections (Forty-third Thousand). Freeman 439.
History & Legacy
If the first edition of 1859 detonated a scientific revolution, the sixth represents Darwin’s considered, public-facing conclusion after more than a decade of controversy, criticism, and debate. It is the last edition published during his lifetime and the form in which many Victorian readers encountered his theory.
Most significantly, this is the first edition in which Darwin employs the word “evolution.” Earlier editions avoided the term; here the theory finally receives the name that would define modern biology.
Issued in 1872 in a smaller and more affordable format, the sixth edition was deliberately designed to reach beyond scientific specialists. Darwin oversaw substantial revisions, clarifications, and expansions intended for general readers, including the addition of a glossary explaining technical terminology.
A new chapter addressing objections—particularly those raised by critics such as St George Jackson Mivart—demonstrates Darwin actively defending the explanatory power of natural selection at a moment when the theory’s implications were still fiercely contested.
While collectors understandably revere the first edition, it was this revised lifetime text that circulated most widely in the later nineteenth century and shaped public understanding of evolutionary theory. Many subsequent reprints and inexpensive editions derive from the sixth-edition text.
In that sense, this version represents not merely the origin of an idea, but its consolidation into cultural reality.
Darwin concludes with one of the most celebrated passages in scientific literature:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 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.”
