Owen, Richard

4to, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED "To P.B. Du Chaillu | from his friend | the author" on the front free endpaper, frontispiece and 12 plates, frontispiece and one other plate hand-coloured, original green cloth, together with two letters by P.B. Chaillu loosely inserted, one to the author (February 1860) and one to "Murray" (requesting that he "forward immediately to Prof. Owen the drawing belonging to him of the skeleton of the man of [sic] that of the Gorilla",  October 1861), extremities of boards worn, letters previously adhered to a black sheet resulting in some glue and paper residue on the verso of each

Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1831[?]-1903), presentation inscription

INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR TO PAUL DU CHAILLU, THE FIRST MODERN EUROPEAN TO CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF THE GORILLA. When Owen published this monograph the gorilla had only recently been captured, and was an object of great popular curiosity. Chaillu, having found living gorillas in central Africa, became admired across Europe and America for his thrilling accounts of his encounters with them in the wild. 

This lot is being sold by the Charles Darwin Trust to fund the gift of Quentin Keynes’ remaining collection of important Darwin and Wallace books and manuscripts to the Linnean Society, for use in their educational programmes.