Evolution
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the intellectual history of evolutionary theory
- Students of philosophy, religious studies or the history of science
- Readers seeking English public-domain texts for thematic reading
- Readers who want to understand the late nineteenth-century intellectual context
Not a good fit for
- Beginners seeking a systematic introduction to modern evolutionary biology
- Readers who prefer accessible popular science with abundant examples
- Readers with little patience for English philosophical argument
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and introduction first to identify the author's angle on the idea of evolution, then decide which chapters to read closely.
- Note as you read the author's different uses of the word "evolution", distinguishing philosophical argument from scientific fact.
- Read alongside a modern popular-science or history-of-science work on evolution to help identify the limitations of the era.
- Read the English text slowly in sections; summarise key arguments paragraph by paragraph before reviewing the overall structure.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book about modern evolutionary biology?
I have only average English. Will this book be difficult?
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About the author
Frank Byron Jevons (1858–1936) was a British classical scholar and researcher of religion, born in Doncaster and died at Radcliffe-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire. He taught for many years at Durham University, where he served as professor of philosophy and as principal, and was one of the early promoters of comparative religion. Three of his works are held here: The Idea of God in Early Religions, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion, and Evolution. The first two focus on the origins of religious ideas and on comparative method, written in a clear and well-organized style suited to readers approaching the basic questions of religious studies; the third surveys and discusses the idea of evolution. Overall, his writing is notable for academic popularization, emphasizing conceptual definition and the organization of material, and it contributed to the spread of comparative religion in the English-speaking world.
