Strong, Asa B.:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE AMERICAN FLORA, OR HISTORY OF PLANTS AND WILD FLOWERS: CONTAINING A SYSTEMATIC AND GENERAL DESCRIPTION, NATURAL HISTORY, CHEMICAL AND MEDICAL PROPERTIES OF OVER SIX THOUSAND PLANTS, ACCOMPANIED ... The first two volumes of this four-volume work. The last two volumes are quite rare. Asa Strong, a physician, was one of the most popular natural history writers of his day. The qualities of each plant are given and its medicinal uses explained. Several of the plates were drawn by the noted illustrator, Edwin Whitefield, and others are by D.W. Moody. A definitive collation for this work is problematic, as Stafleu notes: "The copies listed in The National Union Catalog show a great variation." According to Stafleu, there are three issues of volume I, dated 1846, 1847, and 1848. The present set includes the 1848 third issue of volume I, which should have a frontispiece, engraved title and fifty plates. The present copy includes all those and is therefore complete. The second volume contains one more plate than called for by Stafleu (who notes only an additional titlepage, frontispiece, and forty-five plates). Bennett writes: "The publisher clearly did not count pages of color plates when listing the numbers on the title pages, but counted every separate item on each page. It has even been suspected that he counted fly-specks" (p.103). Bennett further notes that complete sets of Strong's AMERICAN FLORA... are "extremely difficult to locate."Strong is particularly interesting as on

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