Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution

London: John Murray, 1906. First edition, first printing.

FIRST PRINTING OF PIONEERING ANALYSIS OF THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN GENETICS AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF MENDEL'S WORK.

8 inches tall hardcover, green cloth binding, gilt title to cover and spine, frontispiece portrait of Darwin with tissue guard, i-xv, 299 pp, [4] pp publisher's advertisements. Small light stains front cover, spine darkened, residue from removed paper (bookplate?) front and read paste downs. LAID IN: light blue foxed page with heading in red type, "Telegrams to Wybunbury, Doddington, Nantwich", and blue ink listing geologic eras in contemporary hand. Very good in custom archival mylar cover. FROM THE PREFACE: "For the group of subjects of which I intended to give I brief account Mr. W. Bateson has recently proposed the term 'genetics,' an expression which sufficiently indicates their scope to the initiated. Since, however. the meaning of the word 'genetics' is not yet clearly mderstood by everybody, it seemed better to adopt in the present instance a somewhat more descriptive title."

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE: A W F Edwards. "Robert Heath Lock and his textbook of genetics, 1906." Genetics, Volume 194, Issue 3, 1 July 2013, Pages 529–537, "Robert Heath Lock (1879–1915), a Cambridge botanist associated with William Bateson and R. C. Punnett, published his book Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution in 1906. This was a remarkable textbook of genetics for one appearing so early in the Mendelian era. It covered not only Mendelism but evolution, natural selection, biometry, mutation, and cytology. It ran to five editions but was, despite its success, largely forgotten following Lock's early death in 1915. Nevertheless it was the book that inspired H. J. Muller to do genetics and was remembered by A. H. Sturtevant as the source of the earliest suggestion that linkage might be related to the exchange of parts between homologous chromosomes. Here we also put forward evidence that it had a major influence on the statistician and geneticist R. A. Fisher at the time he was a mathematics student at Cambridge."

Offered here is the first printing of an important book. The Sutton-Boveri chromosome theory of heredity of 1902 had little support until the Drosophila work of Thomas Hunt Morgan's group after 1910. Lock devotes over 100 pages to mendelism and cytology, and Elof Axel Carlson says that here Lock achieved "the very union of cytology and Mendelism which was later borne out at Schermerhorn Hall [by Morgan et al.]" The book influenced many important early geneticists. Hermann Joseph Muller (later a leading light in the Morgan group, and Nobel laureate) says that in 1908 he took Edmund Beecher Wilson's "thrilling one semester course on heredity amd the chromosomes, variation and evolution. In this the text chosen by Wilson was Lock's extraordinary book of 1906 - too far 'ahead of its time' to be remembered now - which, with less caution and fewer qualifications than employed by Wilson himself, advocated the sufficiency of Mendelism, multiple factors, the chromosome theory (including exchange of linearly arranged genes during parasynapsis, after de Vries) and the natural selection of mutations, as the basis of all heredity and evolution.". (Muller actually read the book before he took the course, while working as a clerk in a New Jersey Hotel). Lock died in 1915 of a heart attack after influenza and the 4th edition (1916) was brought out by Bella with updating by Leonard Doncaster, who died in 1920 at the age of 42. Thus, two of the youngest and most dynamic members of the Bateson "pack" were not available to continue his work.

OCLC: 31 editions were published between 1906 and 1920 in English and held by 286 libraries worldwide.