KLEIN, Jacob Theodor. Naturalis dispositio Echinodermatum. Accessit Lucubratiuncula de Aculeis Echinorum Marinorum cum Spicilegio de Belemnitis. Gdansk, Thomas Johannes Schreiber, 1734.
£4850
Large paper copy of the first edition of Klein’s beautifully illustrated work on sea urchins, their fossil remains as well as belemnites from some of the most famous cabinets of natural curiosities of the time.
‘Klein’s Naturalis dispositio Echinodermatum(1734) was one of the earliest monographic treatments of the sea urchins' (DSB).
The final two pages of text contain a ‘conspectus’ of a Wunderkammer, detailing the cabinets’ contents, and their divisions. The superb plates, many engraved by Georg Wolfgang Knorr, depict specimens from a number of collections, including that of the important natural scientist Johann Heinrich von Horcher, who created various cabinets of natural curiosities at Dresden, the Danzig lawyer Nathanael Jacob Gerlach, the Lutheran theologian and historian Michael Lilienthal from Königsberg, member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and honorary professor of the University of St. Petersburg, the famous naturalist Johann Georg Gmelin, the Königsberg physicist and teacher of Immanual Kant, Johann Gottfried Teske, the Leipzig pharmacist and naturalist Johann Heinrich Linck, the influential Leipzig alderman and collector Johann Christoph Richter, the Leipzig mathematician Christian August Hausen, known for his research on electricity, as well as examples from a number of other sources.