The Standard Natural History

Boston: S.E. Cassino and Co., 1885. First edition.

COMPREHENSIVE ILLUSTRATED POST-DARWINIAN STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY.

Six 26 x 19 x 5 cm hardcover volumes, ¾ black leather binding, green pebbled cloth covers with gilt ruling, spine with raised bands, gilt titles, marbled endpapers and edges, contemporary ink signature of previous owner to front free endpaper and top of some interior pages, pictorial frontispiece with tissue guard, black & white plates. Vol. I, 1885, Lower Inverterbrates 389 pages, 501 wood engravings, 22 plates; Vol. II, Crustacea and Insects, 1884, 555 pages, 666 wood engravings, 20 plates; Vol. III, Fishes and Reptiles, 1885, 478 pages, 270 wood engravings, 16 plates; Vol. IV, Birds, 1885, 558 pages 273 wood engravings, 25 plates; Vol. V, 1884, Mammals, 535 pages, 244 wood engravings, 52 plates; Vol. VI, 1885, Man, 478 pages, 271 wood engravings, 53 plates. Mixed first and second editions: Vol. I near fine. Vols. II – VI, corners worn, edges rubbed, spine ends frayed. Vol. III with brown leather spine and scattered marginal pencil notations; remaining volumes' spines black and pages unmarked. Binding tight and pages clean and bright in all volumes. A good+ scarce complete set of this beautifully illustrated global natural history and anthropology.

JOHN STERLING KINGSLEY (1854 – 1929) was an American professor of biology and zoology. Upon his graduation in 1875 from Williams College, he enrolled at the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem, Massachusetts, where he studied with Alpheus Spring Packard. Here his work was entirely in the line of systematic zoology. In 1879 he attended the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, where he studied general morphology. Kingsley then attended Princeton University, receiving his Doctorate of Science in 1885. In 1887 he was named Professor of Zoology at the University of Indiana and two years later accepted the chair of Biology at the University of Nebraska. Throughout his career, Kingsley would author over 300 scientific articles and numerous books on such subjects as vertebrae zoology, comparative zoology, and the anatomy of vertebrates. Kingsley was editor Standard Natural History (offered here), and The American Naturalist (1886–96). He had served over the years as president of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences at Lincoln, and the American Morphological Society at Johns Hopkins University.