24 volumes, 12mo. 480 plates, mostly hand-colored. (Some spotting.) Original decorated cloth gilt in various colors (History of the Palms by Berthold Seeman is rebound in contemporary half calf; light wear to extremities, mostly at spine ends and joints, one volume rebacked preserving original spine). Provenance: various bookplates and ownership signatures.

COMPLETE SET, all but 3 are first editions. "Buying a book merely for the sake of its pretty pictures was considered vaguely immoral [in the early decades of the nineteenth century], or at any rate extravagant, but if those pictures happened to illustrate important and revealing truths about Nature - if they were in fact illustrations of God’s benevolent Design - then their purchase was justified. Publishers were quick to exploit this important motive, and it is rare to find a natural history book after the 1840s without any illustrations. In the very cheapest productions, these might consist only of a few poor woodcuts, but in the middlerange books, such as the excellent half-guinea Popular Natural History series published by Lovell Reeve in the 1850s...numerous good colour illustrations were the rule" (Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870, p. 85). RARE: only one complete set has ever come up for auction (sold Sotheby's, 1995).