8vo (205 × 125 mm.), pp. viii, 406. Light offsetting from turn-ins to margin of a few leaves at opening, including title. Contemporary sprinkled calf. Extremities worn, upper cover detached, spine-label wanting. An unsophisticated copy, large and internally very crisp and fresh.
First edition of the work considered the origin of Malthus’s population calculus as used in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Wallace had first introduced a geometrical account of population-growth in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind (1753). “In his Various Prospects of Mankind, [Wallace] had at first suggested community of goods as a solution of the social problem and then pointed out that the increase of population, which would result from communism, was a fatal flaw in his own solution” (Cambridge History of English and American Literature, sub. Malthus).
£600.00
