Green cloth spine with maroon title plates and gilt title. Green marbled boards.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Note: This book carries the £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.

A lovely late Victorian handbook with outstanding coloured prints. This book has seen better days re:  its binding though the contents remain in good order.

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, educated in England. He was a public promoter of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Richard Lydekker ( 25 July 1849 – 16 April 1915) was an English naturalist, geologist and writer of numerous books on natural history.

Richard Lydekker was born at Tavistock Square in London. His father was Gerard Wolfe Lydekker, a barrister-at-law with Dutch ancestry. The family moved to Harpenden Lodge soon after Richard’s birth. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class in the Natural Science tripos (1872). In 1874 he joined the Geological Survey of India and made studies of the vertebrate palaeontology of northern India (especially Kashmir). He remained in this post until the death of his father in 1881. His main work in India was on the Siwalik palaeo fauna; it was published in Palaeontologia Indica. He was responsible for the cataloguing of the fossil mammals, reptiles, and birds in the Natural History Museum (10 vols., 1891).

He named a variety of taxa including the golden-bellied mangabey; as a taxon authority he is named simply as “Lydekker”.