The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.

London: John Murray,, 1863. In support of Darwin First edition of Lyell's last major work. Inspired by the Origin of Species (which was itself influenced by Lyell's Principles of Geology), The Antiquity of Man synthesized the evidence for the existence of humans in the Pleistocene period with evolutionary theory. It was in this work that Lyell began to modify his long-running scepticism of human evolution. The work responds to recently discovered evidence that humans had co-existed alongside mammoths as far back as the glacial period. "Lyell's book was unique among contemporary scientific works in the geographic and disciplinary breadth of its synthesis... he unified data from many areas under a single hypothesis [and] also reached beyond the intellectual frontiers of geology, drawing connections between the geological evidence for human antiquity and the data collected by archaeologists, anatomists and linguists" (Van Riper, p. 141). The book was extremely popular and went through three editions in its first year. Octavo. Original green bead-grain cloth, spine lettered in gilt and decoratively blocked in blind, covers panelled in blind, geological motif in gilt to front cover, reddish brown endpapers, binder's ticket of Edmonds & Remnants on rear pastedown. Wood-engraved frontispiece, plate, numerous woodcut illustrations within text. With 32 pp. of publisher's advertisements dated January 1863 at rear. Cloth and gilt notably clean and bright, extremities and corners bumped, spine ends and head of joints worn, spine toned, front inner hinge split but holding firm, a few gatherings a little roughly opened, light foxing to plate and contents, else clean: a very good copy. A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men Among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory, 1993.