User:Macdonald-ross/OofSp book

Bibliographic tools

The following are works of textual criticism: they concern the Origin of Species as a book, a physical object. Biological commentary is incidental but, nevertheless, they are essential tools for a historical study of Darwin's ideas as expressed in the book.

1. Peckham, Morse (ed) 1959. The Origin of Species: a variorum text. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A variorum contains all variants of a text; this records every change made by Darwin to the first edition up to 1890.

2. Horblit H.D. 1964. One hundred books famous in science. Grolier Club. Contains the first full bibliographic description of the first edition.

3. Barrett, Paul H., Weinshank D.J. and Gottleber T.T. 1961, reprint 1981. A concordance to Darwin's Origin of Species, first edition. Cornell, Ithaca & London. This takes every substantive word in the book in alphabetical order, and lists every occurrence with context and page number. Same idea as concordances to the bible.

4 Stauffer R.C. (ed) 1975. Charles Darwin's Natural Selection being the second part of his big species book written from 1856 to 1858. Edited from Manuscript. Cambridge.

5. Freeman, Richard Broke 1965, 2nd ed 1977. The works of Charles Darwin: an annotated bibliographical handlist. Dawson, Folkestone. Includes all the editions and reprints of all Darwin's works, as far as could be ascertained. Also, an on-line version with a few later corrections:
 * The complete work of Charles Darwin online: Table of contentsbibliography of On the Origin of Species: Both web pages provide links to text and images of all editions of The Origin of Species, including translations in German, Danish, and Russian.

Reviews of the Origin
This is a most useful section. I suggest the inclusion of several more reviews from The complete works of Charles Darwin on-line, on grounds of their influence & notability.

Gray, Asa 1860. Review of Darwin's theory on the origin of species by means of natural selection. American Journal of Science and Arts (Ser. 2) 29 (March): 153-184.

Gray, Asa 1861. ''A free examination of Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species, and of its American reviewers. Reprinted from the Atlantic monthly for July, August, and October, 1860''. London: Trübner & Co., Boston: Ticknor and Fields. (This is the pamphlet sponsored by Darwin)

Huxley T.H. Review in the Times, Dec 26 1859. His first review of the Origin, which elicited a wonderful letter from Darwin, 28th Dec 1859.

The source notes that there are many more reviews, most not yet available on-line. We might one day find we had material for a complete article on this topic. I would also recommend switching all entries in this section to The complete works of Charles Darwin on-line instead of Victorianweb. It makes sense to concentrate on the most complete source, and Vicweb is prone to small type size. Macdonald-ross (talk) 11:21, 18 June 2009 (UTC)