Backed by this evidence, the book proposed to a wide readership that evolution applied as fully to man as to all other life.

As Huxley said in his Advertisement of the Reader, most of the content of his book had been presented to the public before: "The greater part of the following essays has already been published in the form of Oral Discourses, addressed to widely different audiences, during the past three years."

After half a dozen preliminary pages Huxley introduces the study of development: "that every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler to, that which it eventually attains" (p74).

Put simply, Huxley rejects the idea that man should occupy an order separate from the apes.

The addendum to Chapter II was Huxley's account of his "Great Hippocampus Question" controversy with Owen about the comparison of human and ape brains.

A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his view that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo.

The subject was raised at the 1860 British Association's Oxford meeting, when Huxley flatly contradicted Owen, and promised a later demonstration of the facts.

Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and the hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes.

As he says, Huxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: "the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed".

[9] The substance of this paper was presented in 1863 as chapter 2 of Man's place in Nature, with the addendum giving his account of the Owen/Huxley controversy about the ape brain.

In due course, Owen did finally concede that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but said that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of smaller brain size.

It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Samuel Wilberforce.

Bound in dark green pebbled cloth with blind-stamped borders on boards, gilt lettering on spine as follows: head: Man's place in nature / [rule] / T.H.

Dark brick red advertisement end-papers front and back, with Williams & Norgate's publications.

Frontispiece diagram of ape skeletons, photographically reproduced, after drawings by Waterhouse Hawkins, from specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

He took, in Chapter 1 The evidence of the descent of man from some lower form, an approach which made good use of his vast supply of information on the natural history of mammals.

The discussion of a rare human hereditary condition permitting its possessors to move their scalps is connected to the regular use of this ability in many monkeys.