Milan, Paolo Emilio Giusti, 1821. Large 4to (33.5 x 23.3 cm). 73 pp. (including half title, title page); five engraved plates of which four finely hand-coloured. Five blanks in the rear. Contemporary blind boards.

A fine, uncut copy of an extremely rare, detailed, and well-illustrated work on salamanders by the Italian anatomist Mauro Rusconi (1776-1849). This is the first colour-plate book on newts. Rusconi "...describes the courtship and egg-laying behaviour of newts ( T. carnifex) and includes the first illustrations of the behaviors ever published for any salamander" (Adler II, p. 45). "Mauro Rusconi was an Italian embryologist who studied the development of amphibians and fishes. Rusconi was born in Pavia and became a pupil of Spallanzani. In a famous paper, Del Proteo anguino di Laurenti (1819), Rusconi demonstrated that the olm ( Proteus) is an adult animal and not a larval form that maintains gills during development. Some of Rusconi's other research concerned the reproduction of the salamander and the artificial insemination of fish. His most important embryological studies were on the development of the frog's egg, in which he observed and correctly interpreted the process of segmentation, the first divisions of the egg. The Institut de France gave Rusconi a gold medal for science in 1831 (socialarchive virginia edu website). The present papers deal with the ontogeny and behaviour of salamanders, with very precise and detailed illustrations, mostly finely coloured images of living juvenile, subadult and adult specimens. The beauty of these illustrations show that Rusconi was both a fine zoologist and an artist. "He drew and personally hand-coloured the highly detailed plates in each copy" (Adler). The rarity of this and most other works by Rusconi is underscored by Wilhelm Junk in his Rara: "...alle, wissenschaftlich so grundgelegen Werke R.'s [sind] von einer solchen Seltenheit...dass sie als unauffindbar gelten können. Keines - mit Ausnahme der ersten - is nämlich (ganz unbegreiflicherweise) in einer höheren Auflage als 100, einzige sogar bloss 25 Exemplaren gedruckt. So ist auch der Preis eines jeden Werkes, wenn wirklich eines einmal auftaucht, trotz des geringen Umfanges 100 bis 200 M[ar]k". Uncut, thus with the widest possible margins. Pictorial bookplate of "HP" mounted on front pastedown. Some scattered, mostly marginal spotting, more so on the half-title and endpapers; the last anatomical plate with slight, marginal foxing, the others, including the three finely hand-coloured plates of the living animals, however, quite clean. In all, very good copy of this very rare work. Adler II, pp. 44-46; Junk Rara, p. 156; Cat. BM(NH) p. 1768; Nissen ZBI, 3523. Not in the Crane library.