Author: Wallace, A. R.
Title: Die geographische Verbreitung der Thiere, nebst einer Studie über die Verwandtschaften des lebenden und ausgestorbenen Faunen in Ihrer Beziehung zu den früheren Veränderungen der Erdoberfläche.
Description: Dresden, R. v. Zahn, 1876. Two volumes. 8vo (21.3 x 13.8 cm). Double title pages (for the work, and for the two volumes); 1266 pp. [xxix, 579; viii, 658]; seven [5; 2] full-colour maps (several folded), 20 [13; 7] wood-engraved plates. Uniform half calf over marbled boards. Gilt title on spines. = Rare first German edition, published in the same year as the English edition. Wood: "To those more interested in facts than in theories, this book will serve as a kind of dictionary of the geography and affinities of animals. By means the copious index, the native country, the systematic position and the numerical extent of every important and well-established genus of land-animal may be at once discovered, - information (until the publication of the author's monograph) scattered through hundreds of other volumes". The German translation is by the medical doctor, ornithologist, entomologist, and herpetologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) and includes an additional preface. Meyer was director of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum in Dresden. Boards lightly rubbed at extremities, hinges a trifle weak, the large, first, folded map with a few small tears in the folds; small, unobtrusive private owner's stamp, as well as a different, older signature on the second titles, the same stamp in the front free endpapers top margin, tiny damp stain to the top margin of a few leaves; otherwise very good, clean and complete. Another book dealer claims the presence of 27 plates but that must be an error (being the complete number of plates and maps). A very good set. Nissen ZBI, 4331; Wood, p. 617.

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