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.
VALENTIJN, François. Abhandlung von Schnecken, Muscheln und Seegewächsen, welche um Amboina und den umliegenden Inseln gefunden warden. Als ein Anhang zu Georg Eberhard Rumphs Amboinischen Raritätenkammer … Vienna, Krauss, 1773.
£5500
A very rare German rendition and the and only separate edition of the Dutch supplement of 1754 to Valentyn’s Oud en nieuw Oost Indien, vol. III (1726).
It was published as an appendix to Rumpf’s D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (1705). Valentijn had lived in the East Indies for 16 years, where became a friend of the German naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumpf (1627-1702), the pioneer researcher of the natural history of the Dutch East Indies.
Rumpf’s D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer is largely devoted to the conchology of Amboina, and is famous for its fine engravings of shells, reputedly the work of Maria Sibylla Merian. This edition was translated by Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller, professor of natural history at Erlangen and member of the Akademie der Naturforscher.
Apart from the odd mermaid, the plates are exclusively conchological and very finely engraved.