Stirpium Austriacarum Pars I & II continens fasciculos tres cum figuris aeneis - Volumes 1 & 2 [ Professor Isaac Bayley Balfour 's copy] by Crantz, Heinrich Johann Nepomuk - 1769

Vienna: Krauss, 1769. Two volumes bound in one, quarto, illustrated with 18 folding engraved plates, (age-toned, the final plate a littlre frayed at the fore-edge and neatly repaired at the folds), two main title pages six sub-title pages to the fascicles and six dedication pages all with engraved vignettes, several engraved tail-pieces, pp xii, 508, (8), a little age-toning throughout, occasional spotting and foxing, but otherwise sound, smartly bound in a fairly modern half-calf, slightly rubbed.As usual it is the second printing of the first volume, and the first edition of the second. The first title page has the blind stamp of Isaac Bayley Balfour. [As well as Regius Keeper of Edinburgh Botanic Garden, Balfour had the distinction, at various times, of being Professor of Botany at Glasgow, Oxford and Edinburgh. Crantz was a botanist but primarily a physician, lecturing in obstetrics. As an extremely sharp-sighted and sensible observer - and in a scientific dispute with his contemporaries Jacquin and Linnaeus - he discovered and named, for example, the genus Camelina and many new species, such as Pedicularis rostratocapitata, Veronica orchidea, Veronica dillenii. Potentilla crantzii and Noccaea crantzii (= Thlaspi alpestre) are named for him. The six fascicules are dedicated to different botanical societies or natural historians including Saverio Manetti, Albrecht von Haller and the Dane, Petrus Ascanius, a pupil of Linnaeus. Hunt 603; Pritzel 1954*. . Half-Leather. Good.