Description

An early reprinting of the first edition of 1872, the eleventh thousand. Well decorated with 21 illustrations throughout the text and with 7 Heliotype Plates from photographs. 8vo, publisher's original dark green cloth lettered, decorated and ruled in gilt on spine and with ornately framed borders on the upper cover and on the lower cover in blind. viii, 394 pp. A beautifully preserved copy, internally fine, the binding very bright and clean and very solid and sturdy with the hinges in good order, the colour holding strong with no hint of fading, a small chip to the free-fly and a few spots to the pastedowns.

Edizione: a handsome copy, fresh and fine and unusually so, for any 19th century printing of darwin. this is an important volume of darwin's evolutionary writings, and was written, in part at least, as a confutation of the idea that the facial muscles of expression in man were a special endowment. it was, more importantly, along with his 1871 book ‘the descent of man’, part of darwin's attempt to address questions of human origins and human psychology using his theory of evolution by natural selection. darwin noted the universal nature of facial expressions in the book: ".the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements."