Oct. 23 (UPI) — A manuscript by Charles Darwin is expected to sell for up to $800,000 next month and has been described by the Sotheby’s auction house as “extremely rare.”
The document includes a summary of Darwin’s iconic On the Origin of Species, the text regarded as the basis of evolutionary biology, which was sent by the author to magazine editor Hermann Kindt in 1865 — four years after the publication of the book’s third edition.
“I have now recapitulated the chief facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent, by the preservation or the natural selection of many successive slight favorable variations,” the document reads.
“I cannot believe that a false theory would explain, as it seems to me that the theory of natural selection does explain, the several large classes of facts above specified. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.”
Sotheby’s said that the document was previously mischaracterized as a leaf from the working draft of the book’s third edition but was determined to be a note prepared to Kindt soliciting a sample of his handwriting.
“While some of Darwin’s notes and manuscript leaves have survived over the last hundred or more years, he was known to obsessively revise his publications, often discarding pages from working drafts and treating them as scrap paper, making any autograph manuscript extremely rare,” the auction house said in a news release.
It will be sold by Sotheby’s during an auction titled Age of Wonder dedicated to 19th-century science and culture. The auction runs from Nov. 25 through Dec. 9 and will also include a paper by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace titled “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties.”
