Halle, Eduard Anton, 1853. 8vo (20.9 x 13.0 cm). xx, 548 pp. Contemporary marbled boards. Spine with gilt bands and salmon morocco label with gilt ornamental borders and title.

A seldom-seen work by the German (later Chilean) malacologist and palaeontologist Rudolph Amandus Philippi (1808-1904). Philippi wrote the work while travelling in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn, on board the Hamburger brig Bonito, which brought him to Chile. "Philippi was caught up in the German revolutions of 1848-1849 and was seen as a liberal and threatened. He escaped Kassel with help from another malacologist Friedrich Carl Ludwig Koch (1799-1852), whose daughter had been engaged to Bernhard. He stayed underground in Karlshütte (near Delligsen, Lower Saxony) and left Germany on 20 July 1851. He left the rest of his family behind and received letters of introduction from Alexander von Humboldt to aid his travels in Chile. Philippi directed a high school in Valdivia from 1853 and he was also appointed professor of zoology and botany at the Universidad de Chile (Santiago), as well as director of the natural history museum there. He was also sent on an expedition into the Atacama Desert. Philippi's wife and children moved to Chile in 1856 but his wife died in 1867 and two children died young. He worked on several books on natural history in Chile and collaborated with travelling European naturalists like Christian Ludwig Landbeck as well as with museums in Europe" (Wikipedia). The publisher, [Hermann] Eduard Anton (1792-1874), was a malacologist too. Boards worn at edges, label partly chipped; small, semi-circular stain to the top margin of the last 30 or so leaves, and another in the outer margin of a few leaves, as well as a few annotations in light pencil. Otherwise, a very good, clean copy. No auction records in over thirty years. Cat. BM(NH), p. 1566.