Observations Topographical, Moral, & Physiological; Made in a Journey Through part of the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy, and France: with a Catalogue of Plants not Native of England, found Spontaneously growing in those Parts, and their Virtues by Ray, John - 1673

The Bell in St Paul's Churchyard: John Martyn, 1673. Illustrated with three engraved folding plates, an engraved portrait, one engraving within the text, small thick octavo, pp xiii, (i), 499, (i), title to the Catalogus Stirpium, v, (i), 115, with the errata leaf, lacking the title page which is supplied in an old-style photo copy, the plates are a little browned and creased and one is splitting along the fold, some age-toning and signs of use throughout, signs of damp damage to the lower margins throughout, with some pages frayed and flaking, (very slight loss of text to about fifteen pages), bound in a recent very simple full calf, no title to the spine. A good working copy of a very scarce title. [John Ray FRS, 1627 - 1705, was an English naturalist widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. He was among the first to attempt a biological definition for the concept of species. In the spring of 1663 Ray started, together with Willughby and two other pupils (Philip Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon), on a tour through Europe, from which he returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter continued his journey into Spain. He had previously, in three different journeys (1658, 1661, 1662), travelled through the greater part of Great Britain. But from this Continental tour Ray and Willughby returned laden with collections, on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Willughby undertook the former part, but, dying in 1672, left only an ornithology and ichthyology for Ray to edit; while Ray used the botanical collections for the groundwork of his Methodus plantarum nova (1682), and his great Historia generalis plantarum (3 vols., 1686, 1688, 1704). The plants gathered on his British tours had already been described in his Catalogus plantarum Angliae (1670), which formed the basis for later English floras.] . First Edition. Full Leather. Fair.