PENNANT, Thomas

History of Quadrupeds.

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B. White, London, 1781. Two volumes, small quarto, 52 plates; a lovely copy in a beautiful 19th-century tree calf binding, spine decorated in gilt with morocco labels. The first edition of an important work of natural history: Cuvier called Pennant's history of quadrupeds 'encore indispensable'. Ranging widely over the writings of the ancients and the moderns alike, it is Pennant's own investigations, and in particular his personal contact with Sir Joseph Banks and the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, that give the work its accuracy and importance.

Pennant scoured the works of the voyagers for references, and the book brims with notices from the works of Narborough, Byron, Dampier, and the Forsters, to name just a few. Equally importantly, he had examined many of the animals (or, at least, whatever parts of the animals had been brought back to England by sailors), making extensive tours of the material in the British Museum, the Royal Society and especially in the Leverian Museum, which he called 'a matchless collection', expressing the forlorn hope that it may 'remain an honour to his spirit, as well as a permanent credit and advantage to our country'.

For many of the animals in the South Seas and New Holland Pennant relied on Cook's voyages. The work is well known for its wonderful image and description of the kangaroo, but he noted five quadrupeds native to Australia in total, including his own examination of an opossum 'found near Endeavour river'.

In an important sense, Pennant's fascination with the animals of the newly-discovered continent is an invitation to the exploration of Australia and a sign of the excitement about the new prospects. There is palpable longing, for example, when he writes 'A farther account of two straw-coloured animals like dogs, which run like hares, and were of the same size, seen by the late navigators in New Holland, will, I fear, be a long desideratum among naturalists'. This does not seem to be, as it first appears, a reference to the dingo, as Pennant elsewhere explicitly lists the "Dog" seen in New Holland by Dampier.

Pennant is considered to have been one of the foremost natural historians of his generation, and his 'travels and natural history are distinguished by his personal energy, a keen observational sense, and by methodological organization and attention to facts' (DNB). He was elected to the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences in 1757 at the instigation of Linnaeus himself, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society a decade later. In 1771 he published his first separate work on mammalia, his Synopsis of Quadrupeds, which formed the basis for this much expanded work.

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• librero: Hordern House (AUSTRALIA)