DARWIN, Erasmus (1731-1802). The Botanic Garden. [etc.]

DARWIN, Erasmus (1731-1802). The Botanic Garden; A Poem; in Two Parts. Part I. Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes. London: J. Johnson, 1791. 2 parts in one volume, 4to (276 x 215mm). 2 engraved allegorical frontispieces, 18 engraved plates, 6 of which hand-coloured, one folding, one vignette (variable spotting, staining and browning, plates offset onto text). Modern green buckram gilt, old marbled wrappers bound in, new endpapers. Provenance: J. H. Markland, Whitehall Place (old signature on front free endpaper); copious old pen and pencil annotation to first few leaves of the first part. Part I is a FIRST EDITION; part II is a third edition [see note]. Brunet II, 23; Hayward English Poetry 198 (citing part II only): “The Loves of the Plants, which is the second part of The Botanic Garden, was published two years before the first part. It is therefore rarely found as a first edition bound up with the first edition of Part I”; Henrey 470; Hunt II, 67; Nissen BBI 451; Pritzel 2061. The author was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. In the first part, the plate “Fertilization of Egypt” is engraved by Fuseli after William Blake. With 3 other natural history works, namely Virgil’s The Georgicks … With an English Translation and Notes. Illustrated with Copper Plates. By John Martyn (Dublin, 1744, 13 plates, including 5 botanical plates PRINTED IN COLOUR [very early examples of colour printing], contemporary calf), John Sims’s Curtis’s Botanical Magazine; Or, Flower-Garden Displayed … Vol. II. Being the Ninth of the New Series (London, 1824, hand-coloured engraved plates, contemporary calf-backed marbled boards) and Philip Henry Gosse’s Actinologia Britannica. A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals (London, 1860, chromolithographed plates, contemporary half morocco). Provenance: From the Library of the late Sir George Engle. The lot sold as a collection of plates, not subject to return. (4)