The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
Title page of the first edition of
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication |
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| Author | Charles Darwin |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Artificial selection |
| Publisher | John Murray |
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Publication date
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30 January 1868 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | Vol 1: viii,411 +43 figs Vol 2: viii,486. |
| OCLC | 156100686 |
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a book by Charles Darwin that was first published in January 1868.
A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of Darwin's theory of heredity which he called pangenesis.
Darwin had been working for two years on his "big book" on Natural Selection, when on 18 June 1858 he received a parcel from Alfred Wallace, who was then living in Borneo. It enclosed a twenty pages manuscript describing an evolutionary mechanism that was similar to Darwin's own theory. Under pressure to publish his ideas, Darwin started work on an "abstract" trimmed from his Natural Selection which was published in November 1859 as On the Origin of Species. In the introduction he announced that in a future publication he hoped to give "in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded".
On 9 January 1860, two days after the publication of the second edition of Origin, Darwin returned to his original Natural Selection manuscript and began expanding the first two chapters on "Variation under Domestication". He had a large collection of additional notes and by the middle of June had written drafts of an introduction and two chapters on the domestication of pigeons that would eventually form part of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Darwin apparently found writing the book tiresome and writes in his autobiography that he had been "tempted to publish on other subjects which at the time interested me more." In the following July (1861) he began work on different book, the Fertilisation of Orchids which was published in May 1862.
Darwin continued to gather data. His own practical experiments were confined to plants but he was able to gather information from others by correspondence and even to arrange for some of his correspondents to conduct experiments on his behalf. In spite of protracted periods of illness, he made progress and in March 1865 wrote to his publisher, John Murray, saying that "Of present book I have 7 chapters ready for press & all others very forward, except the last & concluding one" (the book as finally published consisted of 28 chapters). In the same letter he discussed illustrations for the book.
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