A document signed by Charles Darwin could sell at auction for a record $1.2 million
A manuscript with a rare autograph by famous naturalist Charles Darwin could sell for more than $1 million after bidding began at an auction in New York on Friday.
The document was written in response to Hermann Kindt, the editor of the Autograph mirror— a sort of celebrity magazine of its time — who had requested a sample of Darwin’s handwriting to be included in his publication.
It’s listed with an estimated price of between $600,000 and $800,000, but the BBC reported that the item is likely to fetch over a million pounds ($1.2 million) by the end of the bids on December 9. Even reaching the lowest estimate would set a world record price for a Darwin manuscript.
Online bidding for the document opened on Friday, with the item being sold as part of a wider auction that also includes a first edition of the British scientist’s seminal book About the origin of specieswhich itself is set to sell for up to $400,000.
The autographed manuscript was described as “extremely rare” by auction house Sotheby’s, which sells the item in New York, and said the document contained a passage from Darwin’s revolutionary text and was “the most important Darwin autograph manuscript ever to appear at auction.” is”.
Darwin was known for obsessively revising his publications, often discarding pages from working drafts, making any autographed manuscript a rarity. He also often signed documents with abbreviated versions of his name, such as Ch, Ch. Darwin, or C. Darwin, so his full signature on the manuscript also adds to its value.
The correspondence dates to the fall of 1865, four years after the publication of the third edition of emergence of species– which, according to Sotheby’s, makes the document all the more significant as it “summarizes all of Darwin’s thinking on the subject [of evolution]’ and contains ‘claims which first appeared in the third, revised edition’ of the text.
“I have now summarized the most important facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified over a long line of descent by the conservation or natural selection of many successive minor favorable variations,” Darwin wrote in the manuscript for Autograph mirror.
“I cannot believe that a false theory would explain the great classes of facts given above, as it seems to me that the theory of natural selection explains them. It is not a valid objection that science has not yet shed light on the much higher problem of the essence or origin of life.”
He added: “Who can explain what constitutes the pull of gravity? Nobody now minds pursuing the results that come from this unknown element of attraction.”
Although widely accepted and revered in the scientific community and beyond, Darwin’s work on the theory of evolution has been a point of contention since its publication and to this day is rejected by some for its direct contradiction to creationism.
“Charles Darwin’s revolutionary text About the origin of species managed to create one Book of Genesis for the modern age, and it would be difficult to overestimate the seismic impact it had not only on 19th century science and culture but also on thinkers and generations that followed,” said Richard Austin, Global Head of Books & Manuscripts at Sotheby’s, in a statement. “We are proud to offer Darwin’s most important autograph manuscript for auction.”
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