Books and Manuscripts

First Edition of Agricola's Work on Subterranean Creatures

Agricola, Georgius (Georg Bauer)
De animantibus subterraneis liber
(Basel): (Hieronymus) Froben, 1549. First edition. 12mo. 79, (29), (4) pp. Froben's engraved printer's device on title-page and verso of final leaf. Full contemporary brown calf, stamped in gilt, rebacked, extremities rubbed, light soiling to boards; speckled red edges; endpapers sometime renewed; ownership signature on title-page; first eight leaves (including title-page) on stubs, with repairs to fore- and bottom edges, possibly supplied from another copy; fore-edge repaired, pp. 17-22, dampstaining in upper and lower edges, and occasionally in fore-edge of same and remaining leaves; scattered light soiling to text. With the green library ink stamp of French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire at bottom of title-page.

A rare first edition of Agricola's essay on subterranean animals and fauna, including passages on cave-dwelling birds, lizards, fish, insects, and troglodytes, as well as more fanciful creatures like trolls and goblins. The essay is largely a compendium of Greek, Latin, and medieval sources, but is supplemented by Agricola with his own observations, questions, and criticisms. Of note is an extensive index of animals at rear, listed in Latin and German, and grouped by their form of locomotion, such as walking, crawling, swimming, flying, and burrowing. The work was later appended to editions of Agricola's authoritative text on mining and metallurgy, De re metallica (1556), but was only published as a separate edition here and in a later 1614 Wittenberg reprint.

Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805-61) was a French zoologist who studied anatomy and is noted for his work on congenital abnormalities in humans and animals. In 1832, he published Histoire générale et particulière des anomalies de l'organisation chez l'homme et les animaux (General and Particular History of Structural Monstrosities in Man and Animals), where he defined the term teratology as the study of congenital abnormalities, and helped establish it as a field of scientific study.

Rare to market, this is the first copy we can locate at auction in 45 years.