REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. Very good plus.. First edition of the first American scientific book illustrated with a photograph, an exploration of fossilized dinosaur tracks (what Warren calls "footsteps of an unknown animal") inscribed to fellow surgeon and Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, Franklin Bache. Scientists struggled valiantly against the imperfect illustration methods of woodcut, engraving, etching, and lithography for centuries. But the 19th century brought a new technology for representing subjects with more accuracy than ever before: photography. REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER is only the second book produced in the United States to include a photographic illustration, and the first US scientific publication to do so.

In the medical field, John C. Warren is best known as the Harvard surgeon who performed the first publicly demonstrated procedure on an ether-anesthetized patient in 1845. It was clear then that Warren understood the importance of photography: after the event, he organized a reenactment of the procedure to be immortalized in daguerreotype by Boston photographers Southworth and Hawes. Warren's interest in photography intersected with his interest in natural history in the form of REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER, which features a salt-printed photograph of a rock slab of fossilized animal tracks.

This monograph discusses other fossils, but the most notable section of the book details the slab. Bird and turtle tracks are among the footprints found preserved in the rock, but they are accompanied by prints that were far more puzzling. Warren theorized that these "footsteps of an unknown animal" may be those of "probably a reptile or a mammal," but he concluded that "perhaps it is safer to believe... that it was an animal of a construction now not existing." Indeed, the footprints were later proven to belong to dinosaurs of the Early Jurassic.

Warren inscribed this copy of REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS to fellow surgeon Franklin Bache, the great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Other inscribed copies are held by the Smithsonian Libraries and the Berkshire Athenaeum, but rarely appear on the market. A significant copy of an important work - not only the first American scientific book with an original photograph, but just the second overall. 9.25'' x 5.5''. Original blue cloth binding with gilt lettering to front board. Yellow endpapers. Folded photographic salt-printed frontispiece of fossil footprints. Two in-text black-and-white illustrations. 54 pages. Inscribed by Warren to Franklin Bache, M. D., to front flyleaf. Binding with mild edgewear, spine ends bumped; a couple tiny spots of soil to boards. Leaves with occasional pinpoint foxing. Clean and bright.