A review of the primates

New York, 1912. FIRST EDITION. Complete with index and errata, frontispieces, memorandum slip tipped in at page 257 in Vol. III. With 27 colored plates (after J. Wolf, Smit and Keulemans), and 135 black and white plates. Original blue buckram, gilt lettering on spine; despite some fading on the biding, a fine, clean copy from the libraries of University of Kansas with its blind-stamp on the title page of Vol. I and Dr. James M. Dolan Jr., director of collections for the San Diego Zoological Society, with his blind-stamp on all title pages. First edition of one of the greatest works on the classification and taxonomy of the Primates order in a period when no institution in the world contained a collection sufficiently large to permit a work like this. Over a period of five years, Elliot analyzed and reviewed all the existing primate species and subspecies, here describing about six hundred species. He travelled extensively to visit the museums and zoological gardens of Europe and the East, including the British Museum, the National Museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and the Natural History Museum in Calcutta. The author offers first a general review of the species and order, with its literature and geographical distribution, then a full description of each with measurements is provided as well as an account of their habits. Elliot notes that the illustrations of the skulls have been enabled with the new methods and instruments invented by the special photographer of the American Natural History Museum, Mr. Abram Anderson. The colored illustrations are a selection from those published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London by his friend, artist Joseph Wolf.

Elliot (1835-1915), an American zoologist, was one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He produced a number of works on ornithology and comparative zoology, working with illustrators such as Joseph Wolf, Joseph Smit, and the celebrated J.G. Keulemans. Elliot concentrated on the study of mammals after the publication of his Monograph of the Bucerotidae, or family of the hornbills in 1882. He was also curator of Zoology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, a position he began in 1894.