Darwin's Annotated Origin Of Species To Be Sold At Auction

A copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin Of Species has been discovered, complete with handwritten annotations by Darwin himself. A translator of the German manuscript, HG Bronn, was thought to have had the annotated sheets when he died in 1862. Once they were retrieved and bound, the sheets were handed over to the German palaeontologist, and Darwin’s correspondent, Melchior Neumayr. The volume has apparently been with Neumayr’s descendants until now.

The changes were made by Charles Darwin on the third edition of his Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin sent the sheets to his Bronn to be included in the second German edition. The alterations were included in all subsequent versions of the book, remaining the final text of Darwin’s influential work.

Scholars apparently had no idea the notes were out there somewhere despite Darwin writing about them in March 1862: “I should like to make a few more corrections on clean sheets of the last English Edition”, and in April: “I have compared the sheets of the Third English Edition with the Second which was translated into German, & have marked with a pencil line all the additions & corrections … Where merely a few words have been altered I have underlined them with pencil: where a sentence has to be omitted I have marked ‘dele’.”

The auction house Christie’s has placed an estimation of £300,000 to £500,000 for the sheets, stating: “for the first time a precise reading of Darwin’s exact revisions without the veil of reconstruction and translation … [the sheets] provide an insight into his working method, and documents the further development of his ideas for his ‘big book’.”

“Annotated copies by him are incredibly rare,” a specialist at Christie’s has said, “This one really shows him engaging with his text … To have his own thoughts on a text that we know occupied him fully right up until his death is really just remarkable. This physical manifestation of a great scientist grappling with his great work is extraordinary, both in terms of its rarity, and the physical evidence of it.”