Considérations générales sur les mammifères ...

AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY

First edition. Title-page vignette, folding table. 12mo. Original paper-covered boards, black label to spine, gilt, extremities slightly rubbed, pages a little toned, but very good. 260pp. Paris, J. Tastu,

Rare presentation copy, inscribed on the title-page: "Donné par l'auteur à Mr Duchoine."

 

This work was published when Saint-Hilaire (1805-1861) was just twenty-one years old, at which point he'd already spent two years working alongside his father at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. It comprises two of the articles he contributed to the tenth volume of the Dictionnaire Classique d'Histoire Naturelle that same year.

 

His position at the museum made him an important figure in the processing, cataloguing and interpretation of the discoveries of the New World brought back by the likes of Freycinet, Duperrey, and Dumont d'Urville. The year prior, his report on Freycinet's voyage - Rapport fait à l'Académie Royale des Sciences, Sur la partie Zoologique du Voyage autour du Monde - was published and some of that information has filtered into this work which includes notes on the kangaroo, koala and echidna.

 

Such was his stature that Darwin included Saint-Hilaire's works on his 1838 list of books to be read.

 

Not in Ferguson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stock Code: 233980