Medium: Original vibrant hand-colored engraving printed on laid paper with plate marks. 

Source: ""Oeuvres du Comte de Lacepede comprenant l'histoire naturelle des quadrupedes ovipares, des serpents, des poissons et des cetaces avec la synonymie des auteurs modernes les plus celèbres" by Comte de LACEPEDE. Published by TH. Lejeune, Bruxelles 1835.

Full sheet size (with blank margins): app.  5.25" x 8.5"

About author: Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède or La Cépède (26 December 1756 – 6 October 1825) was a French naturalist and an active freemason. He is known for his contribution to the Comte de Buffon's great work, the Histoire Naturelle. Lacépède was an early evolutionary thinker, and he argued for the transmutation of species. He believed that species change over time and may go extinct from geological cataclysms or become "metamorphosed" into new species.

After the French Revolution Lacépède became a member of the Legislative Assembly, but during the Reign of Terror he left Paris, his life having become endangered by his disapproval of the massacres. When the Jardin du Roi was reorganised as the Jardin des Plantes and as the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1793, Lacépède was appointed to the chair allocated to the study of reptiles and fishes. In 1798, he published the first volume of "Histoire naturelle des poissons", the fifth volume appearing in 1803, and in 1804 appeared his "Histoire des cétacées". 

From this period until his death the part he took in politics prevented him making any further contribution of importance to science. In 1799, he became a senator, in 1801 president of the senate (a role he also fulfilled in 1807–08 and 1811–13), in 1803 grand chancellor of the Legion of Honor, in 1804 minister of state, and at the Bourbon Restoration in 1819 he was created a peer of France.

Condition:  Toning, age-staining, creasing. Please examine the scan.

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