Author: Chenu, J.
Title: Leçons élémentaires sur l'histoire naturelle des animaux: Conchyliologie.
Description: Paris, Dubochet, 1847. Large 8vo (24.2 x 16.1 cm). viii, 364 pp.; 12 finely engraved plates and 1244 wood-engravings, mostly of shells. Contemporary green half cloth over marbled boards, gilt title on spine. = Written by the French medical doctor and malacologist Jean-Charles Chenu (1808-1879). Mostly on shells, however the first 80 pp. deal with other zoology in general, illustrating, e.g., birds and insects. The beautiful plates are engraved by the great Swiss-born French natural history artist Jean Gabriel Prêtre (1768-1849), arguably one of the best French natural history illustrators of the 19th century. A copy with black and white plates. Copies with (partly) coloured plates exist too. Provenance: the German zoologist, marine biologist and curator at the Zoological Museum of Berlin, Heinrich Hermann Robert Hartmeyer (1874-1923), his stamp ("Dr. R. Hartmeyer") in the top margin of the front free endpaper recto. "Rejecting a university career tied to teaching, he began his first marine studies in Messina, Naples and Rovigno in 1899. In 1900 he became a research assistant and in 1908 curator at the Berlin Zoological Museum, where he worked until his death and completely redesigned the departments of tunicates, bryozoans and echinoderms. Research trips between 1900 and 1908 aimed to clarify animal geographical and phylogenetic questions. In 1901 he accompanied Ludwig Plate to the Aegean and Red Seas, took part in the Hamburger Südwestaustralischen Forschungsreise with W. Michaelsen in 1905 and travelled to the West Indian islands and museums in the USA with Willy Kükenthal in 1906-07" (Deutsche Biographie, emend.). Below Hartmeyer's stamp the signature of the leading Conidae specialist of the second half of the 20th, and early years of the 21st century, Alan Jacob Kohn (1931-2022). Both text and plates with some foxing, but much less than usual and in all a good, complete copy. Not in Nissen, ZBI.

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