Cryptogamen Herbarium.

Bielfeld: August Helmich, 1852-62. First edition. Octavo portfolio with 9 fascicles bearing 220 mounted specimens of mosses and other primitive plant species. Complete. Publisher’s blind-stamped brown cloth portfolio with gilt cover lettering, original ties present but broken. A couple of specimens starting to degrade but overall, an excellent copy of this very fragile and scarce book. OCLC locates various copies with various numbers of fascicles but only finds 2 complete with all 9 as presented here (Paris; Bium and the University of Virginia).Each of the 9 fascicles bears a title page and each of the specimens bear a printed description just below the sample. Thus the book is printed in its entirety and someone had the tedious job of placing the correct specimens in the correct places. A few contemporary manuscript corrections. Hermann Wagner was a very early and important pioneer of biodiversity of ecosystems. “The first clear and simple system of categorizing the different types of vegetation was produced by the German botanists Hermann Wagner and Emil von Sydow in 1888. Their system was incredible precocious for it recognized 9 of the 10 categories that are still commonly used… Only the Mediterranean type of scrubland was not identified” (Cox; Biogeography).