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 Very good copy in the original gilt-blocked decorated cloth. Slight suggestion only of dust-dulling and rubbing to the spine bands and panel edges. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. Series: The Wayside and Woodland Series. 

Richard South FRES (July 1846 – 28 March 1932) was an English entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), particularly the smaller moths. South was born at Cochran Terrace in Marylebone, London, England and educated at a private school, in Reading.

He began publishing entomological notes from 1874 to 1878 on the moths of Mill Hill. He is best known for writing three important books on butterflies and moths of the British Isles. After his death, these were updated by H. M. Edelsten. Michael Salmon has described these as “innovative” and “a new kind of [field] guide for the [twentieth] century”, noting their early use of colour photographs and eschewing of “Victorian polixity and classical preciousness”. The moth volumes were reprinted as late as 1980.

South was editor of The Entomologist. He also published many papers on the Lepidoptera of the Far East, including China and Korea, and an account of the butterflies collected by Captain F.M. Bailey in western China, Tibet and South-Eastern and the Mishmi Hills.

Major parts of his collections of specimens survive, in the Natural History Museum and in the collection of Birmingham Museums Trust.