Tropical Wild Life in British Guiana.

New York: The New York Zoological Society, 1917. First edition. Fine. 24 cm; 504 pages. Four plates in color, and numerous half-tone plates and illustrations. In original green cloth stamped in gilt with the image of a chick. Top edge gilt.

William Beebe (1877-1962), one of the premier ecologists of the first half of the twentieth century, pioneered enormous advances over 19th-century science. According to Stephen Jay Gould, “He came to the astonishing realization that a few acres of tropical forest can contain as many kinds of birds and insects as the entire continental United States." The research station he established in what is now Guyana carried on investigations of every aspect of ecology, from the composition of the soil to the life of the epiphytes found high in the canopy, to everything living in between: birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, mammals. The introduction to this volume was written by Beebe's friend and admirer, "Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.