Author: Russell, Patrick
Title: Descriptions and Figures of Two Hundred Fishes
Date: 1803
Price: GBP £ 6,500
Book Code:

 

Russell,Patrick. Descriptions and Figures of Two Hundred Fishes ;collected at Vizagapatam on the coast of Coromandel.

Printed by W.Bulmer & co., Shakespeare Press, for G.and W.Nicol, 1803. First Edition, 2 volumes, large folio, contemporary marbled boards,paper spines, with 198 aquatint plates on 171 leaves, a fine copy of a very scarce work.

  6,500.00   

Patrick Russell(1727-1805), British physician and naturalist. For the first part of his career Russell was a physician in Aleppo, Syria, where he studied plague and other diseases. In the 1780s he traveled to India, and while employed as a naturalist for the East India Company, he made large collections of specimens and drawings of the plants, fishes, and reptiles of the country.Russell's collection of fishes was deposited in the Company's museum at Madras.Included in the collection is Russell's Ribbon-fish(Regalecus russelli), finely illustrated on plate 40. It was caught on the outside of the surf at Vizagapatam in March 1788 and the fisherman could give no name to it.

This rare work was never issued in a coloured state.The author explains in his preface that it was found that the colours of the fish deteriorated too rapidly after death.The full series of plates is present but they are erratically numbered 1-9, 9, 10-16, 18-32, 35, 37-54, 56-106, 106, 107, 109-163, 165-199.

From 1796 to 1809 the East India Company published his multivolume, illustrated work on the snakes of the Coromandel coast. In 1797 the naturalist George Shaw named Russell's viper(Viper russelli) in his honor.A strikingly marked highly venomous snake of the genus Vipera.

Nissen Schone Fischbucher 110 ;Nissen ZBI 3540 ;Wood p.547.