[x], 380 pp. Engraved portrait frontispiece. (4to) 12x7½, later green calf-backed marbled boards, spine gilt, red morocco lettering piece. First Edition.

One of the earliest works relating to evolution. "In this very curious treatise Hale in the first place attempts to show that the world must have had a beginning; next, with lawyer-like caution, that if by possibility this were not so, the human race at any rate cannot have existed from eternity; then passes in review certain 'opinions of the more learned part of mankind, philosophers and other writers, touching man's origination,' and finally defends the Mosaic account of the matter as most consonant with reason." (DNB). Wing H258; Garrison-Morton 215; Norman 965.