An Essay towards the Probable Solution of this Question. Whence come the Stork and the Turtle, the Crane and the Swallow,

£2,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

ESTC records five locations in the US - Folger (x2, 1 copy is lacking three leaves), Harvard (“imperfect…small hole in title-page affecting text”), Huntington, William Andrews Clark and Yale. No copies recorded on Rare Book Hub or ABPC. A “second edition” was published in 1739 (BL and Glasgow (Hunterian) only). Some copies have a small errata slip pasted on the blank verso of the title-page, it is not present here and the errata is not corrected. “The earliest treatise on bird migration in England” suggesting that migrating birds fly to the moon for winter. With reference to Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. “The seventeenth century was completely engrossed with the physical and astronomical problems of human flight to the moon and, in biology with questions of classification and structure. Charles Morton stands alone in attempting to solve the age-old problem of bird migration, which was more intensely to occupy later students. Regarded today as a fantastic curiosity, in its proper setting in the seventeenth century, this serious study vividly reflects the new and prodigious interest in the heavens following Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler“ (Thomas P. Harrison, Birds in the Moon, Isis , December 1954, p.323) This little work by the nonconformist minister and tutor Charles Morton (bap. 1627, d.1698) was published posthumously and argues that, “it is not impossible that divers of these fowls, which make such changes, and observe the seasons, do pass and repass between this and

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