2 volumes, 8vo (188 x 117mm). One folding engraved plate. (Some minor toning and occasional spotting.) Contemporary French calf gilt (some repairs to joints, minor wear to spines and extremities). Provenance: Émile Burnat (his bookplate and donation label to Bibliothèque du Conservatoire Botanique de Geneve with duplicate release stamp, 1922); Kenneth K. Mackenzie (bequest to:); New York Horticultural Society of New York (bequest bookplate, 1934). 

 

FIRST EDITION of this important work in botanical classification. In this book, Adanson proclaimed his contempt for Linneaen systems. Adanson had been sent to Senegal in 1748 to catalogue the natural resources of the country. "The bewildering diversity of tropical vegetation made the systems of classification proposed by Tournefort and Linnaeus appear pitifully inadequate, based as they had been on the wild flora of Europe and a limited number of cultivated plants...he concluded that, by making a large limited number of systems and then putting together those plants which belonged together in the greatest number of systems without attaching greater importance to one set of characters than another, he could make one generally satisfactory natural system" (Hunt Cat., Introduction, pp. xcii-xciii).  Hunt 577; Pritzel 21