Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, delivered at The Royal College of Surgeons [The Robert Washington Oates copy]

Princes Street, Corner of Gerard Street, Soho: J. Callow, 1819. First edition. Illustrated with 12 engraved plates (several of them folding), octavo, pp xxiv, 579, (i), slight age-toning to the front endpaper, the half-title and the frontispiece, otherwise very clean internally, neatly bound in a recent brown half-leather and cloth. With the bookplate of Robert Washington Oates on the front endpaper. [Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet FRCS FRS (1783 -1867) was an English surgeon who became President of the Royal College of Surgeons of London and Serjeant Surgeon to the Queen. In his mid-thirties, he published two books of his lectures which contained pre-Darwinian ideas on man's nature and, effectively, on evolution. In 1819, the second book, known by its short title of the Natural history of Man, caused a storm of disapproval from conservative and clerical quarters for its supposed atheism, and within the medical profession because he advocated a materialist rather than vitalist approach to human life. He was linked by his critics with such other 'revolutionaries' as Thomas Paine and Lord Byron. It was "the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later". It contained some remarkable anticipations of later thought, but was ruthlessly suppressed. To this day, many historical accounts of evolutionary ideas do not mention Lawrence's contribution. He is omitted, for example, from many of the Darwin biographies, from some evolution textbooks, essay collections, and even from accounts of pre-Darwinian science and religion. Although the only idea of interest which Darwin found in Lawrence was that of sexual selection in man, the influence on Alfred Russel Wallace, was more positive. Wallace "found in Lawrence a possible mechanism of organic change, that of spontaneous variation leading to the formation of new species".]. First Edition. Half-Leather. Very Good.