HOOKER, Sir William Jackson, & John Charles Lyons.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Century of Orchidaceous Plants selected from Curtis's Botanical Magazine. First edition, from the Knowsley library of Edward Smith Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby (1775-1851). A politician and a naturalist, Stanley became one of the figureheads of the science of zoological classification, and was president of the Linnean Society of London from 1828 to 1834, as well as being president of the Zoological Society of London for twenty years.Stanley not only encouraged the reading of accounts of new species by chairing meetings of the two societies, but contributed many scientific papers himself to the proceedings of the Zoological Society and donated many specimens to its collections. His own collection in the Knowsley Museum is estimated to have included 20,000 mammals, birds, and lower vertebrates. This copy contains his armorial bookplate, and the shelf mark of the Back Library at Knowsley noted on the front free endpaper verso. It is also annotated at the head of the half-title "from Boone April 15th 1849", a reference to the London booksellers and publishers T. & W. Boone.The illustrator Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892) was described by Sir Joseph Hooker, the son of the author, as an "incomparable botanical artist" (Blunt, p. 224). "Fitch remains the most outstanding botanical artist of his day in Europe. He was the first draughtsman to produce really satisfactory drawings from dried herbarium specimens, and for this alone botanists in England would remain forever in his debt. He

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