Voyages and Travels in the Levant in the years 1749, 50, 51, 52 (First English Edition)

A$1,250 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

The first systematic natural history of the Holy Land, and the poignant final testament of one of Linnaeus's own "Apostles": a young naturalist who died indebted and unpublished on his journey home, his collections rescued by his mentor's own intervention. Fredrik Hasselquist (1722–1752) was one of the celebrated "Apostles of Linnaeus"; a small band of students dispatched by Carl Linnaeus on scientific expeditions across the globe to gather the specimens and observations for scientific studies. Prompted, by his own account, by a lecture in which Linnaeus lamented how little the natural history of the Holy Land was known, Hasselquist set out at the age of twenty-seven on a journey that carried him through Asia Minor, Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Rhodes, and Chios across nearly four years of sustained fieldwork. He never lived to see the results published: falling seriously ill on the return journey, he died near Smyrna in February 1752, leaving substantial debts against which his own collections and papers were promptly seized. It was Linnaeus himself who intervened, arranging for Queen Lovisa Ulrika of Sweden to purchase the collections and secure their return, receiving in turn a set of duplicate specimens that would form the basis of his own subsequent Flora Palaestina (1756). Linnaeus then took on the further task of editing his late student's journals for publication, issuing them in Swedish in 1757 together with his own biographical account of the young naturalist's

• Binding: Hardcover

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