Charles Darwin › The book, counted
On the Origin of Species, counted
The first edition of 1859. Here is what is in it, and what is not.
- natural selection247
- pigeon, pigeons112
- struggle for existence26
- Galapagos23
- human5
- monkey3
- Lamarck3
- Malthus2
- evolved1
- evolution0
- survival of the fittest0
- ape, apes0
- missing link0
Whole-word occurrences in the Project Gutenberg text of the first edition. Man occurs 108 times; one sentence of it is about the origin of man.
What the numbers mean
The book everyone believes is about apes contains the word ape zero times, and says one sentence about human beings. It mentions pigeons five times as often as the Galapagos, because the pigeon fanciers were doing on purpose, in public, what Darwin said nature does slowly, and you could watch them.
The one evolved is the last word of the book: from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
When the missing words arrived
Survival of the fittest, Herbert Spencer's phrase, went into the fifth edition in 1869, at Wallace's urging. Evolution first appears in the sixth edition, in 1872, thirteen years after publication. In 1859 the word meant the unfolding of a form already present in the embryo, the opposite of Darwin's argument. His phrase was descent with modification.
Check it yourself
Open the first edition at Project Gutenberg and search for whole words. (Search for evolution carelessly and you will find revolution.)
More about Charles Darwin
- Did Darwin say “survival of the fittest”?
- Did Darwin say humans came from apes?
- Why did Darwin wait twenty years to publish?
- Did Darwin discover evolution in the Galapagos?
- Did Wallace discover natural selection first?
- Did the Origin of Species sell out on the first day?
- Was Darwin an atheist?
- The timeline
- The reading room: original sources online
The trial file
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