VOLNEY, Constantin-François Chasse-Boeuf, comte de.

Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis d'Amérique. Suivi d'éclaircissemens sur la Floride, sur la colonie française au Scioto, sur quelques colonies canadiennes et sur les sauvages. Enrichi de quatre planches gravées, dont deux cartes géographiques et une coupe figurée de la chúte de Niagara.

Paris, Courcier & Dentu, 1803. 2 vols, 8vo (195 x 125 mm), pp. [iv], xvi, 300; [iv], [301]–534, [1,errata], [1, ‘avis au relieur’], with four folding engraved plates; half-titles present; contemporary green half calf with mottled boards; extremities slightly rubbed. First edition, first issue. One of the earliest geological and climatological descriptions of the United States. It contains the first geological map of the continent, an early diagram of Niagara Falls, the earliest description of the trans-Allegheny region, and the first extensive study of the climate of the United States.The Tableau was compiled from information gathered during a three year visit to the US and was originally intended to be the first part of a projected work on North America, in which a second volume was to describe the political institutions and the character of the inhabitants. ‘Volney’s book [however] is not a travel book in which scientific description and analysis are included as part of a travel narrative, but rather it is a book in which organized description and analysis is the main object’ (White’s introduction to the 1968 Hafner edition of the Tableau p. ix).‘On October 11, 1795, Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, compte de Volney, accomplished French linguist, philosopher, politician, scientist, author, and extensive traveller in Africa and Asia Minor, landed in Philadelphia. He had returned to France to take part in the early revolutionary movement, but had fallen from favor and . . . now intended to make an indefinite, and perhaps permanent, stay in America. He stayed only three years . . . during which he met almost all the Americans of literary and scientific standing and travelled to the east, to the north, to the south and westward almost to the Mississippi River . . . . He took back with him to France extensive notes and a great collection of rocks, minerals and fossils and wrote the first book to give an organized synthesis of the physiographic and geologic regions of the United States and of the climatology of the continent’ (White p. v).Sabin notes that there are two issues of this edition; in the first, the Vocabulaire de la langue des Miamis is paginated 525–532 (as in our copy), in the second the Vocabulaire is paginated seperately as pp. 1–8.Clark II 69; Howes V141; Sabin 100692.

• GBP 750.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: T2116

• librero: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)