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EDWARDS, William Henry (1822-1909)

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£ 1 260
Auction dateClassic
12.07.2023 00:00UTC +01:00
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CHRISTIE'S
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United Kingdom, London
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ID 993146
Lot 205 | EDWARDS, William Henry (1822-1909)
EDWARDS, William Henry (1822-1909)

The Butterflies of North America ... first [-second, -third] series. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888-1884-1897.

With its finely hand-coloured plates, Edwards' Butterflies of North America was judged by its contemporaries as 'probably the most important faunistic work on Butterflies that has ever appeared' (quoted in ANB). In 1846, Edwards travelled with his uncle Amory Edwards up the Amazon River, recounted in his popular account A Voyage up the River Amazon (1847). This work inspired Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates to sail for the Amazon in 1848, with Edwards providing advice and letters of introduction. In 1868 Edwards began publishing the present work as a quarto pamphlet series of descriptions and illustrations of North American species. Later, these were gathered into 3 volumes (1874 - here in reprint of 1888 - 1884, and 1897). The work covers Edwards’s discoveries in polymorphism, which had a great influence on evolutionary theorists such as Bates and Wallace, who had shown how the selection of mimetic and polymorphic forms among tropical butterflies eventually produced new species. The Butterflies of North America was beautifully illustrated by Mary Peart, with hand-colouring by Lydia Bowen. Peart herself reared specimens from the egg in order to illustrate the insects’ preparatory stages. The First Series is the 1888 reprint, the other vols first eds, BM(NH) II, 512; Nissen ZBI 1234.



3 volumes, quarto (272 x 220mm). Half-titles to vols I-II, that of vol. II bound after title and before preface, 154 hand-coloured lithographic plates by Mary Peart, Edward A. Ketterer and others, many coloured by Mrs Lydia Bowen or Mrs Leslie (Third Series volume title bound at beginning of vol. I). Contemporary half morocco (spines sunned, extremities rubbed, more heavily at head of spines). Provenance: authorial presentation inscription on pasted slip on prelim dated 1891, to: – David Bruce (1833-1903, Scottish MAerican naturalist and collaborator with Edwards) – James J. Waring (1883-1962, first full-time Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine; bookplates) – Bonhams 15 July 2004, lot 550.





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