CONTAINS DARWIN & LINCOLN--BORN SAME DAY. Atlantic Monthly Volume VI, 1860 by Darwin, Charles and Gray, Asa - 1860

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. First edition.

1860 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY JULY-DECEMBER 1860--CONTAINS 3 REVIEWS OF DARWIN'S ORIGIN OF SPECIES AND AN EDITORIAL PROMOTING LINCOLN'S CANDIDACY FOR PRESIDENT (BOTH MEN WERE BORN FEBRUARY 12, 1809).

9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, 3/4 black leather binding, spine with raised bands, gilt ruled compartments, and gilt title and initials of previous owner (Fr. A. Bryan). Edges marbled, marbled endpapers with armorial bookplate of Fr. A. Bryan to front paste-down, iv, 764 pp; joints starting, binding tight, light foxing to endpapers, pages crisp and unmarked, very good.

Darwin first wrote to Asa Gray in 1855. A correspondence and intellectual comradeship quickly developed to the point where in July 1857 Darwin informed Gray of his as yet unpublished theory of natural selection, thereby making Gray the third person (after Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell) to know his secret. Part of this letter to Gray was later included in the presentation to the Linnean Society in July 1858 when Darwin first made his theory (and Wallace's) public. After the publication of The Origin of Species, Gray became Darwin's foremost American defender against his Harvard colleague Louis Agassiz and other critics. Gray arranged for the publication of an American edition of the Origin of Species and wrote a positive review for the American Journal of Science. Then in the three issues-July (pp 109-116), August (pp 229-239), October (pp 406-425), 1860--of The Atlantic Monthly (contained in this volume) he wrote again, anonymously, in defense of Darwin (the first two parts "Darwin on the Origin of Species", the third "Darwin and His Reviewers"). Darwin was extremely pleased with Gray's Atlantic Monthly piece and eventually funded its publication-retitled and under Gray's name-by Ticknor and Fields, the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, and had 250 copies sent to him for distribution by Trubner and Co. Because James Fields was a close friend of Louis Agassiz, the pamphlet was never sold by Ticknor and Fields in the United States. "Thus, although actually printed in America, the pamphlet was in effect a British publication and received the impetus of Darwin's promotional efforts there" (Dupree, Asa Gray, p. 299).

Notably, also contained in this volume is a report in the October issue (pp 492-502) titled The Election in November: ""We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history . . . It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies. . . . We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has head experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician. The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it. 'All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing.'" [Psalm 66, Isaiah 13, Hebrews 6]. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. Both lost their mother at a young age and, despite their differences in upbringing, both men saw themselves as autodidacts. In his book, Lincoln and Darwin (2010) James Lander argues that they also shared an interest in science and a skeptical approach to religion. Darwin closely followed the events of the American Civil War and wanted Lincoln and the Union to prevail. Lander explores similarities in the intellectual development, concerns, and impacts of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, focusing in particular on the issue of slavery in the United States, which both men influentially opposed. Lander's broader argument is that Lincoln and Darwin shared the same outlook on the central issues of race, science, and religion. He also looks at the relationship between science and race in the 19th century United States and the emergence and influence of scientific racism. Of particular interest in this volume of The Atlantic, the article on the coming presidential election refers to geologic time and extinction of the dinosaurs as a metaphor for the hoped-for extinction of slavery. Also in this volume, a review of Home Ballads and Poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, concluding, "We have had no more purely American poet thn Mr. Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous expression."

THE ATLANTIC was founded in 1857 in Boston, as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. In 1860, three years into publication, The Atlantic's then-editor James Russell Lowell endorsed Republican Abraham Lincoln for his first run for president and also endorsed the abolition of slavery.