The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.

1875. London: William Clowes and Sons for John Murray, 1899. 8vo, 2 volumes. Original green cloth, boards with blind-ruled borders and panelled in blind, spines gilt, dark-brown endpapers, partially unopened; pp. I: xiv, 473, [1]; II: x, 495, [1], 32 (publisher's catalogue); previous owner's signature to prelims, occasional faint foxing, very good. Second edition, eighth impression.. In the preface Darwin draws attention to important revisions to the previous edition and especially to the content of Chapter XI. The theory of Pangenesis, currently discussed as the inheritance of acquired characteristics and here expounded by Darwin for the first time, was enlarged and amended for the second edition. Other chapters consider "the amount and nature of the changes which animals or plants have undergone whilst under man's dominion", employing observations of inheritance within a species in an effort to understand the causes of variability. One of Darwin's most influential and wide-ranging works. BM(NH) I, p. 422; Freeman 898; Waller 10789.