Medicinal Plants

Very good complete copy of this last great English medical botany of the 19th century.

With 306 fine hand-coloured botanical plates, several double-page, some finished with gum arabic, drawn from nature and lithographed by David Blair. Each dynamic plate filled to the edge with details of the plant's stalk, leaf, fruit, seed, branch and flower.

Each plate with several pages of text including description, habitat, collection and commerce, general character and composition, medical properties and uses.

Robert Bentley (1821-1893) was an English botanist and pharmacologist. He was professor in botany at King's College from 1859, and became a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in 1874.

Henry Trimen (1843-1896) was a London-born botanist who became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Ceylon (Botanical Gardens of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka) from 1879-95. He also published The Flora of Ceylon (1893)

David Blair (1820-1899?), was a botanical artist and lithographer who also worked on Transactions of the Linnean Society (1875), Berthold Carl Seemann and James Britten's Journal of Botany, British and Foreign (1872-8), James Britten's European Ferns (1880), Lena Lowis' Familiar Indian Flowers (1881), etc.

Half brown leather, gilt spines with four raised bands, black leather title labels chipped on two volumes (missing on other two), marble boards scuffed and browned. Endpapers foxed, but interior clean and fresh with all plates delicately hand-coloured. Library stamps of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Library on the base of the spine and on the rear of each plate.