The Book of Butterflies, Sphinges, and Moths

London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., and Waugh and Innes, Edinburgh, 1832. First edition.

96 PLATES OF INDIVIDUAL BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS IN BRILLIANT HAND-COLOR.

Two hardcover volumes, 9x14.5 cm, full leather binding, gilt rulings to covers, spines with raised bands, gilt titles on black leather labels, marbled edges and endpapers, bookplate of Francis Hubert Barclay to front paste-down of each volume, ink inscription front free endpaper Vol. I: "F. H. Barclay/ Leyton/ Essex/ From G. G. B. 1886". Engraved title page to each volume, titled, "Constable's Miscellany, Original and Selected Publications in the Various Departments of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Vol. I, i-xxxviii, 215 pp; Vol. II, i-vi, 206 pp; complete with 96 handcolored plates (the last several bound out of order). Very good in custom archival mylar covers.

CAPTAIN THOMAS BROWN (1785 –1862) was born in Perth, Scotland, and educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh. When he was twenty, he joined the Forfar and Kincardine Militia, rising to the rank of captain in 1811. When he was quartered in Manchester, he became interested in nature, and edited Oliver Goldsmith's Animated Nature. After his regiment was disbanded he bought the Fifeshire flax mill. That, however, burned down before Brown had the opportunity to insure it. He then started to write books about nature for a living. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1818, one of his proposers being James Jardine. In 1840 he became curator of the Manchester Museum, where he served for twenty-two years. He wrote several natural history books, including the one offered here. He became a fellow of the Linnean Society, a member of the Wernerian, Kirwanian and Phrenological Societies, and president of the Physical Society.