SHAW, George

Museum Leverianum, containing select specimens from the museum of the late Sir Ashton Lever.

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James Parkinson, 1792- [London], 1796. Quarto, 72 handcoloured engraved plates; a very handsome volume in recent tan half calf, gilt, paper boards. One of the finest of all eighteenth-century natural history books, Shaw's work is particularly well known for its glorious depictions and descriptions of natural history subjects, including a lengthy and early notice of the kangaroo, and for its particularly beautiful ornithological plates.

Shaw abandoned the church to become a professional naturalist, and his career, which coincided with the early years of the colonization of eastern Australia, was marked by the opportunity to describe many of the novel fauna of the continent for the first time. He provided the generic name Macropus for the kangaroo: '...the most extraordinary and striking animal which the Southern Hemisphere has yet exhibited to our view, may admit of being differently arranged by systematic naturalists. If we take into consideration the very remarkable particularity of the abdominal pouch with which the female is provided, we may... rank it in the genus Didelphus [Opossum]... In the mean time, if external form or habit alone were to be regarded, we might consider the Kanguroo, as a gigantic kind of Jerboa...' (pp. 285-6).

Many of the images and much of the description are based on Shaw's own tours of the famous Leverian Museum, which contained many natural history specimens from the Cook voyages and much Australian material. As well as the kangaroo, seven Australian birds are figured and described in this fine book: the Splendid Parrot; Southern Brown Parrot; Pompadour Parrot; Ground Parrot; Bronze-Winged Pigeon ('amongst the most beautiful birds hitherto discovered in the continent of New Holland'); the Banksian Cockatoo; and the Tabuan Parrot. There is also a very good notice of the New Zealand Wattle Bird, with the comment that it is 'one of those late acquisitions with which the discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere have enriched ornithology. It was a bird entirely unknown to the naturalist of Europe, till brought during the voyages of the late Captain Cook from New Zealand'.

Despite the fact that the work assays all manner of animals, its particular attention to birdlife meant that it was assigned a star in the seminal Fine Bird Books, meaning "really fine". It shares this category with the better parts of Audubon, and with Gould's Birds of Australia (the latter's Birds of Europe is considered a three-star work).
Nissen, ZBI 3835; Whittell, pp. 439-40; Wood, p. 566.

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