PISO, Willem et al.

by Willem et al Piso

£6,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition, substantially expanded and revised from an earlier work of 1648, and superbly illustrated, of the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso s (1611-78) study of the medical natural history of the West Indies, issued with Georg Marggraf s (1610-44) topographical, anthropological and natural-historical survey of Brazil and Chile, with descriptions of the culture and languages of their Indigenous inhabitants, Jacob de Bondt s (1592-1631) natural-historical work on the East Indies, a hotch-potch of new material and portions of and an earlier published work, and, finally, a second, short botanical work by Piso on the medicinal and aromatic plants of the Indies, which appears for the first time. Piso and Marggraf had undertaken a research voyage together to Brazil under the patronage of Johan Maurice of Nassau-Siegen (1604-79), governor of Dutch Brazil, their work being published in 1648 as Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, edited and with contributions by the geographer and director of the Dutch West India Company, Johannes de Laet (1581-1649). Probably de Laet s most important role was the decoding of Marggraf s work, written in a secret cipher before his death in Angola in 1644. A decade later, Piso essentially highjacked the project, putting his own name on the title (which had previously carried only the dedication to Nassau-Siegen), inserting numerous laudatory poems to himself in Latin and Greek, and augmenting it with his new work on aromatic plants. Piso also chopped and cha

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.