Illustrated Natural History (Animals and Birds)

New York: Gilbert H. McKibbin, 1899. Small Hard Cover. Fair/No Jacket. 0x0x0. Binder's copy. Rear board cloth wrinkled. 1899 Small Hard Cover. 191 pp. Includes illustrations in color. Arranged for young readers. A natural history of animals and birds written for children. John George Woods was an "English writer and lecturer on natural history... He was educated at Ashbourne grammar school and Merton College, Oxford; and after he had taken his degree in 1848 he worked for two years in the anatomical museum at Christ Church under Sir Henry Acland... After 1876 he devoted himself to the production of books and to delivering in all parts of the country lectures on zoology, which he illustrated by drawing on a black-board or on large sheets of white paper with coloured crayons. These “sketch lectures,” as he called them, were very popular, and made his name widely known both in Great Britain and in the United States. In 1883–1884 he delivered the Lowell lectures at Boston. Wood was for a time editor of the Boy's Own Magazine. His most important work was a Natural History in three volumes, but he was better known by the series of books which began with Common Objects of the Sea-Shore, and which included popular monographs on shells, moths, beetles, the microscope and Common Objects of the Country. Our Garden Friends and Foes was another book which found hosts of appreciative readers." - Encyclopedia Britannica "From the early 1850s Wood was developing a career as a natural historian; his first book, The Illustrated Natural History, was published in 1851. Several more works had followed by 1856, when he began to give occasional lectures on natural history subjects. Wood's appeal as a populariser of natural history was spotted by the publisher George Routledge. Routledge asked him to contribute to a shilling series of handbooks, starting with Common Objects of the Seashore (1857), which enjoyed huge popularity among holiday-makers to the coast. Common Objects of the Country (1858) had an even greater success, and Routledge followed this with a three-volume Illustrated Natural History (1859) by Wood. Many future naturalists were said to have been inspired by reading these books at an early age." - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography