Dresden, Königliche Geologische Museum Dresden, 1877. Folio (33.5 x 25.7 cm). Title page, 32 pp. (numbered [103]-134); three hand-coloured lithographed plates [numbered V-VII]. Original blind wrappers in later blind wrappers.

A rare and important contribution to the knowledge of the varied and colourful butterflies of New Guinea, written by the German pharmacist and entomologist Theodor Franz Wilhelm Kirsch (1818-1889). The fine plates show many spectacular new species. Provenance: with a handwritten dedication, dated Dresden, 9 October [18]95 by A. B. Meyer (i.e., the German entomologist, herpetologist, and ornithologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer [1840-1911]) to his colleague, Hofrath Martin (i.e., the German medical doctor Ludwig Martin [1858-1924], who lived for seven years on Sumatra and published on Malayan Lepidoptera). Meyer "served for nearly thirty years as director of the Königlich Zoologisches und Anthropologisch-Ethnographisches Museum (now the natural history museum or Museum für Tierkunde Dresden) in Dresden. He worked on comparative anatomy and appreciated the ideas of evolution, and influenced many German scientists by translating into German the 1858 papers by Darwin and Wallace, which first proposed evolution by natural selection. Influenced by the writings of Wallace, with whom he interacted, he travelled to Southeast Asia, and collected specimens and recorded his observations from the region" (Wikipedia). Small label of the Internationaler Entomologischer Verein E.V. pasted on the front wrapper. Edges a bit frayed and soiled; otherwise a very good copy. Horn-Schenkling II(2), p. 490.