Lamarck's Genera Shells Vintage 1991 Shell Print E.A. Crouch
A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Shell prints from 1991, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1827, this is a reprint.
Suitable for framing, the image size is approx 8.5" x 11" or 21.5cm x 28cm edge to edge plus small white border.
This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description.
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While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.
Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.
Shells illustrating Lamarck's Genera (1827)
SHELLS illustrating Lamarck's Genera. Hand-coloured lithograph by E.A. Crouch, pl. 19 from his Illustrated Introduction to Lamarck's Conchology, 1827.
For more than fifty years conchology was studied within the framework proposed by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae of 1758 in which all the molluscs then known were arranged in a few genera. It was a simple arrangement, hallowed by long usage, but it did not satisfy Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck. At the end of the eighteenth century, when in his fifties, he began publishing his own ideas about the arrangement of molluscs and eventually proposed many new genera to accommodate them. Unfortunately his publications were unillustrated and it was difficult, especially for Britons isolated from the Continent by Napoleon's antics, to visualize his new genera, correspondingly difficult to arrange a shell collection according to them. To overcome these difficulties, one or two books describing and illustrating the Lamarckian system of conchology were published. The most attractively illustrated of them was Edmund A. Crouch's Illustrated Introduction to Larnarck's Conchology. By illustrating one or more of the species included in each genus of Lamarck's arrangement, as published in his Histo ire Naturelle des Anirnaux sans Vertèbres, 1815-22, Crouch provided a useful service for shell collectors. The central figure on this plate, for instance, represents the Crenulate Auger, Terebra crenulata, a species placed by Linnaeus in the genus Buccinum and by Lamarck in his new genus Terebra. Crouch's figure showed collectors what Terebra shells looked like and enabled them to recognize similar shells in their own collections. The high quality of his lithographs must have helped identification. Although a few copies of Crouch's book are dated 1826 on the title page, it seems that 1827 was the true date of publication.