Author: Meyen, F. J. F.
Title: Outlines of the geography of plants: with particular enquiries concerning the native country, the culture, and the uses of the principal cultivated plants on which the prosperity of nations is based. Translated by Margaret Johnston.
Description: London, The Ray Society, 1846. 8vo (22.0 x 14.1 cm). Title in German, title in English, x, 4422, 16 pp.; folded chart representing the range of mean temperature for various zones. Publisher's embossed cloth with gilt title on the spine and gilt Ray Society vignette on the front board. Yellow endpapers. Top edge gilt. = A very good, entirely undamaged copy of an early, well-written work on plant geography. The author, Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen (1804-1840) was a German medical doctor and botanist. After an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in Memel (Lithuania), Meyen came to Berlin in 1821, where he studied medicine at the University of Berlin. From 1826 onwards, Meyen worked as a military doctor. On the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt, he took part in a circumnavigation of the world as a ship's doctor on the Princess Louise from 1830 to 1832. This took him to Brazil, Chile, Peru, Polynesia, China, and finally St. Helena. He brought back extensive botanical collections provided him a wide-ranging knowledge of the earth's vegetation, which formed a basis for this book, Grundriß der Pflanzengeographie (1836), deemed worth an English translation by the renowned Ray Society. The inclusion of the original German title is peculiar. The spine is a bit sunned, as nearly always in the Ray Society cloth bindings (although often it is worse), and there is minimal wear to the spine ends, but otherwise it is in a seldom-seen condition: clean, apart from a few, tiny spots, unmarked, and with the hinges, joints and boards entirely intact.

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