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Charles DARWIN

The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the same Species

John Murray, London 1877, 13x19cm, relié.

“I do not think anything in my scientific life has given me so much satisfaction as making out the meaning of the structure of heterostylous flowers” (Darwin, Autobiography)

First edition. One of the 1250 copies printed. 15 engravings and 38 tables in the text. Complete with the index and the publisher's catalogue at rear.
Publisher's green cloth binding by Simpson & Renshaw, expertly restored and retinted, spine decorated and lettered in gilt, boards decorated in blind, dark brown endpapers slightly faded. Some scattered foxing. Slight damp mark to the upper margin of the first hundred leaves. Some pencil annotations.

Charles Darwin wrote three major books on plant reproduction. The most important titled The Different Forms of Flowers concludes more than 40 years of studies on floral biology. This seminal work is one of the first scientific tests of the theory of evolution. Darwin demonstrates here how the astonishing structural variety of flowers initially results from natural selection; the immobility of plants and their need for pollen vectors (animals, wind, water) leading to floral adaptation.
“Here is a book on the different forms of flowers in plants of the same species. Beware of the simplicity of this title, it carries serious questions concerning biology, disrupts physiological conceptions hitherto admitted as certain, and reshapes main elements of a science. At the first steps taken with Ch. Darwin into new fields introduced by this book, one perceives not only that peculiar feeling one experiences in approaching the unknown, but the strangeness of the facts revealed is even less impressing than the collapse of convenient and classical conceptions occurring in our minds.” (Amédée Coutance, preface to the first French edition)
“The wonderful diversity of the means for gaining the same end [cross-fertilisation] […] depends on the nature of all the previous changes through which the species had passed, and on the more or less complete inheritance of the successive adaptations of each part to the surrounding conditions” (Darwin, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, p. 258)
Both inspired by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, author of an important botanical work, and his father's tropical plants collection, Darwin's early interest in the complexity of the plant world undoubtedly contributed to his first questions about the diversity of life.
Darwin's most influential mentors were also two botanists: his teacher John Stevens Henslow and his longtime friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, first scientist to support Darwin's hypothesis, who recognized “a gradual change of species may well have taken place”. According to Spencer C. H. Barrett, “they no doubt encouraged Darwin to consider plants as suitable subject material for evaluating his developing ideas on variation and evolution”.
Future author of the Origin of Species Charles Darwin began his in-depth study of plants to evaluate the relevance of his theory after settling at Down House (Kent) in 1842. Plants were easy to grow and amenable to direct observation and experimentation. Darwin had seeds sent to him from many parts of the world, allowing him to study the subject in all its diversity to ensure the universality of his conclusions. Spencer C. H. Barrett, in “Darwin's legacy: the forms, function and sexual diversity of flowers” (in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 12 February 2010) notes the importance of this work on Darwin's most acclaimed study: “Finally, as is evident from their increasing inclusion in later editions of the Origin of Species, plants provided outstanding subjects for evaluating his ideas on the evolution of adaptation and the importance of outcrossing for maintaining variation.” Shortly before publishing his Origin of Species he confessed in a letter to J. D. Hooker on 3 June 1857, that he found 'any proposition more readily tested in botanical works… than zoological'.
In his autobiography, Darwin again showed the fundamental importance of Forms of Flowers concluding forty years of scientific efforts to support the most revolutionary theory of the 19th century. Even today, it remains an influential and remarkably durable contribution on floral function and the evolution of mating systems.
“In [1877] The Different Forms of Flowers, & c. appeared and in 1880 a second edition. This book consists chiefly of the several papers on Heterostyled flowers originally published by the Linnean Society, corrected, with much new matter added together with observations on some other cases in which the same plant bears two kinds of flowers. As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers” (Darwin, Autobiography, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, p. 78)
A rare, inscribed copy of this seminal work on plant reproduction, adaptation, and evolution.


See more on this subject:

Spencer C. H. Barrett, Darwin's legacy: the forms, function and sexual diversity of flowers
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter

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