HUXLEY'S OBITUARY OF DARWIN

HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY.

Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased. [Charles Darwin].

London, Harrison and Sons, 1888.

8vo. In later full blue cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London", vol. XLIV. Entire volume offered. Soiling to extremities, endges of front board torn and upper front hindge with small tear. Library label pasted on to front free end-paper. Vague blindstamp to title-page of volume. Internally fine and clean. [Darwin's orbituary;] I-XXV pp. [Entire volume: viii, 464, XXXV, (1) pp.].

First appearance of Huxley's famous obituary of Darwin.

"While Huxley was composing this and other expositions of technical education in the late 1880s, he was also writing an obituary notice on Darwin for the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Though he undertook this piece in 1883, he did not complete it until five years later. In letters to Foster and Hooker in early 1888, Huxley remarked that he was still rereading Origin of Species, trying to separate the "substance" of the theory from its "accidents," with the aim of warding off a generation of "hostile comments and would-be improvements.". Even though he had written at least a half-dozen abstracts of the work and was reading it, he said, "for the nth time," he was "getting along slowly" and finding it "one of the most difficult books to exhaust that ever was written." At this juncture in his life, it seemed that Huxley had difficulty concluding what he had always concluded previously about Darwin's theory: that its points of central importance were the facts of variation, the Malthusian principle of overpopulation, and its consequence, universal struggle. As Huxley finally came around to saying once again the obituary article , it was immaterial how organisms differed from each other or why." (White, Thomas Huxley: Making the 'Man of Science, P. 152)

Darwin-Online A344.

Order-nr.: 57931