The Science of Life.

WELLS, H.G.; Julian S. Huxley and G.P. Wells.

Item Number: 111098

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1931.

First edition of “the first modern textbook of biology”, inscribed by H.G. Wells to his wife. Octavo, two volumes, illustrated endpapers. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page of volume one in the year of publication, “Isabel Love from H.G. April 25, 1931.” An exceptional association. “Wells had begun the book during his wife’s final illness and is said to have used work on the book as a way to keep his mind off his loss” (Norman and Jean Mackenzie, H. G. Wells: A Biography, pp. 352, 356). Near fine in very good dust jackets, bookplate.

The Science of Life is a book written by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells, gives a popular account of all major aspects of biology as known in the 1920s. It has been called "the first modern textbook of biology" and "the best popular introduction to the biological sciences". Wells's most recent biographer notes that The Science of Life "is not quite as dated as one might suppose". In undertaking The Science of Life, H. G. Wells, who had published The Outline of History a decade earlier, selling over two million copies, desired the same sort of treatment for biology. He thought of his readership as "the intelligent lower middle classes ... [not] idiots, half-wits ... greenhorns, religious fanatics ... smart women or men who know all that there is to be known". Julian Huxley, the grandson of T. H. Huxley under whom Wells had studied biology, and his son "Gip", a zoologist, divided the initial writing between them; H. G. Wells revised, dealt (with the help of his literary agent, A. P. Watt) with publishers, and acted as a strict taskmaster, often obliging his collaborators to sit down and work together and keeping them on a tight schedule. (H. G. Wells had begun the book during his wife's final illness and is said to have used work on the book as a way to keep his mind off his loss.) The text as published is presented as the common work of a "triplex author". H. G. Wells took 40% of the royalties; the remainder was split between Huxley and Wells's son. In his will, H. G. Wells left his rights in the book to G. P. Wells.