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25 Darwin's Singular Notion In the late summer or early autumn of 1859,

Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience.

He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. Everyone is interested in pigeons, he observed helpfully.

Elwin's sage advice was ignored, and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

was published in late November 1859, priced at fifteen shillings. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day.

It has never been out of print, and scarcely out of controversy, in all the time since, not bad going for a man whose principal other interest was earthworms and who, but for a single impetuous decision to sail around the world,

would very probably have passed his life as an anonymous country parson known for, well, for an interest in earthworms. Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809,

(An auspicious date in history: on the same day in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln was born. ) in Shrewsbury, a sedate market town in the west Midlands of England.

His father was a prosperous and well-regarded physician. His mother, who died when Charles was only eight, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of pottery fame.