Actinologia Britannica. A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals with Coloured Figures of the Species and Principal Varieties
GOSSE, Phillip Henry
NEAR FINE COPY IN PUBLISHER'S BINDING
Published: Van Voorst, 1860
Stock code: 51700
Price: £660.00
8vo., First Edition, with coloured frontispiece, 10 fine coloured lithographed plates, one plate in monochrome and numerous engraved illustrations in the text, neat late nineteenth-century signature on front free endpaper; original decorative dark green cloth, upper board framed in black enclosing title on decorative spray all in gilt, gilt back,dark top, primrose endpapers, a near fine copy.
Complete with half-title and the erratum slip to Part III (often missing) correctly bound at B1. The 'Actinologia' is widely recognised as Gosse's masterpiece - the finest of all his writings on natural history and (unlike 'Omphalos' and others) untainted by religious fervour. Its exquisite illustrations, painstakingly prepared (often by candlelight) with meticulous accuracy, are astonishingly detailed and considerable credit is due to the engraver Dickes who worked the originals for press. A moving account of the labour expended on this work is given by the author's son Edmund in his classic autobiography 'Father and Son' (1907). The younger Gosse also provides a vivid account of his father's spiritual agony in attempting to reconcile his scientific reason with his faith as a member of the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren. Tragically, Gosse the elder was unable to accept the revelations of Darwin, Huxley and others, and his previously respected standing was rapidly eroded. The work, which illustrates every known British species, remains the standard authority on the subject, and must stand also as a tribute to a substantial talent lost in the scientific upheavals of the Darwinian age. Freeman & Wertheimer 108; Freeman 1390.