Royal 8vo. Half-title; 16pp. publisher's catalogue at end; hand-coloured aquatint frontispiece, 38 engraved plates (33 hand-colored), numerous wood-engraved illustrations. (Some marginal browning or spotting to uncolored plates.) Original pictorial brown cloth gilt, Remnant & Edmonds binders' ticket (contents a bit loose, old residue from letter or bookplate on front pastedown). Provenance: Capt. Beaumont, R.N. and Mr. Y. Barliff? (early lending library notations at foot of pastedown); Dr. Wright (ownership signature on pastedown). Presumably, this is Captain Lewis Beaumont (1847-1922) of the Royal Navy, who served as a senior lieutenant in the British Arctic Expedition aboard HMS Discovery in an attempt to reach the North Pole.

FIRST EDITION of Prichard's final book-length work, presenting a concise popularization of the anthropological and ethnological ideas he had first developed in his influential study Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813 and subsequent editions). He concluded that the human race developed from dark-skinned ancestors and that the lighter pigmentation of some peoples emerged gradually alongside the rise and expansion of civilization. By 1836 he had advanced the view that “all human races are of one species and one family,” despite the wide variety of physical characteristics observed among them. Sabin 65475. A VERY BRIGHT COPY.