Books and Manuscripts

Russell, Patrick
An Account of Indian Serpents, Collected on the Coast of Coromandel…
London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co., for George Nicol, 1796. Two volumes in one (with the first part of A Continuation of an Account of Indian Serpents… London: Printed by W. Bulmer, for G. and W. Nicol, 1801). First editions. Elephant folio. viii, 49, (2), (53)-91, (1); v, (i), 11, (1) pp.; without the three additional parts of Continuation, which were issued between 1804-09. Illustrated with 51 hand-colored engraved plates and three uncolored engraved plates. Three-quarter red levant over beige linen-covered boards, stamped in blind and in gilt, boards and extremities rubbed, lightly soiled; all edges gilt; marbled endpapers; by Zaehnsdorf; large illustrated book-plate and small morocco book-plate of G.R. Nicolaus on front paste-down; scattered light spotting to text and plates. Nissen ZBI, 3539; Wood, p. 547

Scarce first edition of Scottish naturalist Patrick Russell's acclaimed work on Indian snakes, the first work ever published on the subject and one of the greatest works on herpetology. 

During the 1780s Russell worked for the British East India Company as a botanist in the Carnatic region of Southern India. While stationed there he began to amass a large collection of specimens of plant and animal life, and became increasingly concerned with the problem of snakebites. Using information collected from Indigenous sources as well as Company officials, he began extensive studies on venomous snakes in the hopes of creating a means in which to identify them and for the creation of antidotes. As he wrote in the preface of this work on the rationale of studying snakes, “The terror occasioned by those numerous reptiles, is immoderately aggravated by the indiscriminate apprehension of all being poisonous. To distinguish, therefore, those that are really so, from such (by far the greater number,) as are harmless, becomes a matter next in importance to the discovery of a remedy against their poison.” In 1787 he wrote his first treatise on the poisonous snakes of the Coromandel coast, which was printed officially at Madras. Building off of that work and with funding from the East India Company, in 1796 he published the above Account, featuring 46 finely hand-colored plates, "forty-four of which were the product of a huge collaborative enterprise in which Russell enlisted the help of other company servants. Russell's Account also relied heavily on Indian knowledge, although he subjected local wisdom to the trial of experiment and his own observations” (ODNB). Beginning in 1801, Russell expanded the current work with his Continuation, that reached four parts by 1809, and which added 41 plates. The current work contains the first part of that four-part series, with nine finely hand-colored plates.

Scarce. Of Russell's work on Indian snakes, it is the Account alone that is typically found, and it is rare when seen with any part of the Continuation.