Daniel Giraud Elliot | A monograph of the felidae or family of the cats, 1883

Daniel Giraud Elliot

A monograph of the felidae or family of the cats. [London:] printed for the subscribers, by the author, 1883

FIRST EDITION, folio (600 x 470mm.), list of plates, 43 hand-coloured lithographed plates by J. Smit after J. Wolf, printed by M. and N. Hanhart, green three-quarter morocco by Zaehnsdorf, upper wrappers to 11 original parts bound in at end, occasional spotting

"Among the best illustrated of the numerous treatises by Elliot" (Wood). The fine plates in this volume are the result of painstaking research by Elliot, who trawled the collections of museums in America, Britain and Europe. After an exhaustive survey of the previous literature, Elliot found it necessary to rationalise the taxonomy of the cat family, and reduced the amount of recognised species by about a third.

LITERATURE:

Nissen ZBI 1279; Wood, p.332;