It was sold out on its first day of publication in 1859. It is the major book of the last century and remains the most readable and accessible of all the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. It beguiled then and still does today.

Darwin's aim was to show the probability that every species is a development from previous species, which implied that man evolved from earlier and different forms of life. Darwin concluded that there exists a "natural selection" of favorable variations, which in the course of years succeeds in producing a variety of living things through this process of evolution.

Darwin, like Freud after him, transformed the way people thought about God, the world around them, other people and themselves.