* John Austin ( legal philosopher ) ( 1790 – 1859 ), English jurist

In 1859, Nobel's father left his factory in the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel ( 1831 – 1888 ), who greatly improved the business.

* 1859 – Petroleum is discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania leading to the world's first commercially successful oil well.

* 1779 – Carl Ritter, German geographer ( d. 1859 )

* 1785 – Thomas De Quincey, English author ( d. 1859 )

* 1859 – The Tuscan National Assembly formally deposes the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

* 1859 – Katharine Lee Bates, American poet ( d. 1929 )

* Alexander John Cuza, prince of Romania ( 1859 – 1866 )

* 1859 – A geomagnetic storm causes the Aurora Borealis to shine so brightly that it is seen clearly over parts of USA, Europe, and even as far away as Japan.

* 1859 – Matilda Howell, American archer ( d. 1938 )

* 1859 – Vittorio Sella, Italian photographer ( d. 1943 )

* 1917 – L. L. Zamenhof, Polish creator of Esperanto ( b. 1859 )

* 1859 – Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer, Nobel Prize laureate ( d. 1952 )

* 1859 – British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.

* 1944 – William Stephens, American politician ( b. 1859 )

* 1803 – James Curtiss, American politician, Mayor of Chicago ( d. 1859 )

* 1859 – Walter Camp, American football player, coach, and writer ( d. 1925 )

* 1943 – Alexandre Millerand, French politician, President of France ( b. 1859 )

Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 ), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

* Page, Norman, ‘ Housman, Alfred Edward ( 1859 – 1936 )’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 )

His siblings included Sarah ( 1802 – 1859 ), Naphtali ( 1807 ), Ralph ( 1809 – 1898 ), and James ( 1813 – 1868 ).

The Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister 1855 – 58, 1859 – 65

On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged at Charles Town, Virginia.

In 1859, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published.

According to Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of natural selection, features such as camouflage evolved by providing individual animals with a reproductive advantage, enabling them to leave more offspring, on average, than other members of the same species.

This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory ; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.

The possibility of linking humans with earlier apes by descent only became clear after 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

* 1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, one of its major problems was the lack of an underlying mechanism for heredity.

* 1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

* 1859 – King Charles XV & IV accedes to the throne of Sweden-Norway.

Studies of Charles Darwin's notebooks have shown that Darwin arrived separately at the idea of natural selection which he set out in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, but it has been speculated that he may have had some half-forgotten memory from his time as a student in Edinburgh of ideas of selection in nature as set out by Hutton, and by William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew who had both been associated with the city before publishing their ideas on the topic early in the 19th century.

The greatest change was the widespread acceptance of evolution as the mechanism of biological diversity and species formation, following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were biologist Charles Darwin ( 1809 – 82 ), author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ( 1859 ), and political scientist Karl Marx ( 1818 – 83 ), author of Das Kapital ( 1867 ).

* 1777 – Charles Cagniard de la Tour, French physicist ( d. 1859 )

* 1859 – Charles Brantley Aycock, 50th Governor of the U. S. state of North Carolina ( d. 1912 )

* 1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, the anniversary of which is sometimes called " Evolution Day "

* The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin's 1859 book

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* A Tale of Two Cities ( 1859 ) by Charles Dickens

In his 1859 The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin recalls seeing coloured drawings of zebra-donkey hybrids, and mentions " Lord Moreton's famous hybrid from a chesnut mare and male quagga ..." Darwin mentioned this particular hybrid again in 1868 in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, and provides a citation to the journal in which Lord Morton first described the breeding.

Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection.

On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology.

Not until the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, and the large-scale abandonment of the literal reading of the Bible that it caused in Britain, did many of Paine's ideas take hold.

; 1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, which leads to various reactions.