• Title : Moule, Mytilus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 205mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23849

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 205mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Solen, Solen
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 205mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23859

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 205mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Anodontites, Anodontites
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23832

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Anodontites, Anodontites
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23836

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Cardite, Cardita
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23864

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Corbule, Corbula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23861

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Trigona, Trigonia
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23869

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Donace, Donax
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23892

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Mye, Mya
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23860

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Mactre, Mactra
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23881

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Mactre, Mactra
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23885

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Mactre, Mactra
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23888

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Moule, Mytilus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23884

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Moule, Mytilus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23865

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Moule, Mytilus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23850

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Moule, Mytilus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23851

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Lucine, Lucina
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23916

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Lucine, Lucina
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23915

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Terebratule, Terebratula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23871

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Terebratule, Terebratula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23873

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Terebratule, Terebratula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23874

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Terebratule, Terebratula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23872

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Terebratule, Terebratula
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23877

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23858-1

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23855

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23854

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23856

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23857

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23903

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23905

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23897

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23910

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23894

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23904

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23902

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : Venus, Venus
• Size: 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1789
• Ref #:  23908

Description: 
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique Conchology or Shell print by Jean Baptiste Lamarck was drawn by Henri Joseph Redoute (1766 - 1852) - younger brother of the famous illustrator P J Redoute - engraved by Robert Benard and published in the 1789 edition of Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature(1782-1832) by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - Off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 11in x 8in (280mm x 200mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7in (255mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois regnes de la nature was an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, animals and minerals, notable for including the first scientific descriptions of many species, and for its attractive engravings. It was published in Paris by Charles Joseph Panckoucke, from 1788 on. Although its several volumes can be considered a part of the greater Encyclopédie méthodique, they were titled and issued separately.

Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières (Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter) was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. Arranged by disciplines, it was a revised and much expanded version, in roughly 210 to 216 volumes (different sets were bound differently), of the alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d Alembert.
Two sets of Diderots Encyclopédie and its supplements were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to a specialized editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air (which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire universel (Vol. 1 – 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.
The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:
84 volumes;
43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and
53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page.
The publication was continued by Henri Agasse, Panckouckes son-in-law, from 1794 to 1813, and then by the latters widow, Mme Agasse, until 1832, when it was completed in 102 livraisons or 337 parts, forming roughly 166½ volumes of text (depending on how the parts were bound) as well as 51 illustrated parts containing 6,439 plates. The number of pages totalled 124,210 pages, of which 5,458 pages were plates. To save money, the plates belonging to architecture were not published. Pharmacy (separated from chemistry), minerals, education, Ponts et chausses were not published as had been announced.
Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles. The one in Oeconomie politique is an excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily.
When completed, the encyclopedia suffered at least one great weakness. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added onto by other dictionaries, supplements, and appendices that an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc. Overall, probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Mignes Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844–1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages.
The Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de1744 – 1829
Lamarck was a pioneer French biologist, who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics.
Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.
Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the kings garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeuss greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarcks work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; French Flora). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.
With Buffons support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffons son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffons death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of botanist of the King and keeper of the Kings herbaria.
Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (Methodical Encyclopaedia) , a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal dhistoire naturelle.
Lamarcks career changed dramatically in 1793 when the former Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). In the changeover, all 12 of the scientists who had been officers of the previous establishment were named as professors and coadministrators of the new institution; however, only two professorships of botany were created. The botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and René Desfontaines held greater claims to these positions, and Lamarck, in a striking shift of responsibilities, was made professor of the insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Although this change of focus was remarkable, it was not wholly unjustified, as Lamarck was an ardent shell collector. Lamarck then set out to classify this large and poorly analyzed expanse of the animal kingdom. Later he would name this group animals without vertebrae and invent the term invertebrate. By 1802 Lamarck had also introduced the term biology.
This challenge would have been enough to occupy the energies of most naturalists; however, Lamarcks intellectual aspirations ran well beyond that of reforming invertebrate classification. In the 1790s he began promoting the broad theories of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that he had been nurturing for almost two decades. He also began thinking about Earths geologic history and developed notions that he would eventually publish under the title of Hydrogéologie (1802). In his physico-chemical writings, he advanced an old-fashioned, four-element theory that was self-consciously at odds with the revolutionary advances of the emerging pneumatic chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. His colleagues at the Institute of France (the successor to the Academy of Sciences) saw Lamarcks broad theorizing as unscientific system building. Lamarck in turn became increasingly scornful of scientists who preferred small facts to larger, more important ones. He began to characterize himself as a naturalist-philosopher, a person more concerned with the broader processes of nature than the details of the chemists laboratory or naturalists closet.
In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802 the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans (1802; Research on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815–22; Natural History of Invertebrate Animals) . Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie zoologique : The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.
With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular environments to which they had been exposed.
By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits. Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences. Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could result in species change.
Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century, since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to its offspring.
Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical. Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forth—both systematically and in detail—a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

• Title : T III............Ta. XXXIX
• Ref  :  70542
• Size: 19in x 12in (485mm x 305mm)
• Date : 18th century
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition

Description:
This large original copper-plate engraved antique cross sectional architectural print, of a substantial Roman building was published in the 18th century.
Beautifully engraved original antique print on heavy laid paper with a heavy impression. (Ref: M&B; Tooley)

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 19in x 12in (485mm x 305mm)
Plate size: - 16in x 10 1/2in (410mm x 270mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light age toning
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

• Title : Marchand De Betel...Schmit del....Imp. Litho. de Melle. Formentin
• Ref  :  91229
• Size: 13in x 9 1/2in (330mm x 245mm)
• Date : 1825
• Condition: (A) Very Good Condition

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of a Chinese Betel Nut Seller by D. Bazin de Malpiere, after William Alexander, was engraved by Schmidt and published in the 1825 French edition of La Chine, Moeurs, Usages, Arts et Métiers, Peines Civiles et Militaires, Cérémonies Religieuses, Monuments et Paysages (Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese), Paris: Chez L Éditeur, Goujon et Melle Formentin, Firmin Didot, 1825-27.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 13in x 9 1/2in (330mm x 245mm)
Plate size: - 13in x 9 1/2in (330mm x 245mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light age toning
Plate area: - Light age toning
Verso: - Light age toning

Background: 
In 1792, Alexander was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy, published in 1797.
In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings, after his travels to China with The Earl of Macartney. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions. This publication was re-issued over the next twenty years in various languages including French.

Alexander, William 1767 – 1816
Alexander was an English painter, illustrator and engraver. The hallmarks of his work, usually executed in watercolours, were clearness and harmony of colour, simplicity and taste in composition, grace of outline, and delicacy of execution. He accompanied the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792. Prints of his work were reproduced from engravings. One his of works was used to illustrate Cadell & Davies Britannia depicta.
Alexander was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of Harry Alexander, a coachmaker. He was educated at Maidstone Grammar School, but in 1782, at the age of 15, moved to London to study art - first under William Pars, and subsequently Julius Caesar Ibbetson. In February 1784, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He assiduously applied himself to the mastery of his profession, obtaining the notice and approbation of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
In 1792, he was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy (published in 1797) In 1794 he returned to England and married Jane Wogan the following year. She died soon afterwards.
His other principal works were: Views of Headlands, Islands, etc. taken during the Voyage to China (1798); drawings based on Daniells sketches, for Vancouvers Voyage to the North Pacific Ocean (1798); and the descriptive plates to Sir John Barrows Travels in China (1804), and Voyage to Cochin China (1806). In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.
Besides his works as a draughtsman, he made several engravings - the principal one of which is a representation of the Festival given by the Earl of Romney to the Kentish Volunteers, on 1 August 1799, from his own drawing.
In 1802, Alexander was appointed professor of drawing at the Military College at Great Marlow, resigning in May 1808 to take up the post of assistant keeper of antiquities in the British Museum. In the years 1810, 1812, and 1815, he made drawings of the terra cottas and marbles in the Museum which were engraved and published in three volumes - the accompanying text being provided by Taylor Combe (keeper of the Department of Antiquities). Alexander had completed drawings for a fourth volume before his death.
He died at the house of his uncle in Maidstone in July 1816, and was buried in Boxley churchyard. He was described in one of his obituaries as a man of mild and unassuming manners, rich in the knowledge of art, and of unsullied integrity.

• Title : China - Plate 18....Published Jan. 1814 by J Murray, Albenarle Street (Plate XVIII A Mandarins Servant on Horseback)
• Date : 1814
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  25461
• Size: 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of a Mandarins servant on horseback by William Alexander was published in the 1st 1814 - dated - edition of Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)
Plate size: - 9 1/2in x 7in (240mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - Light age toning
Verso: - None

Background: 
In 1792, Alexander was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy, published in 1797.
In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings, after his travels to China with The Earl of Macartney. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions. This publication was re-issued over the next twenty years in various languages including French.

Alexander, William 1767 – 1816
Alexander was an English painter, illustrator and engraver. The hallmarks of his work, usually executed in watercolours, were clearness and harmony of colour, simplicity and taste in composition, grace of outline, and delicacy of execution. He accompanied the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792. Prints of his work were reproduced from engravings. One his of works was used to illustrate Cadell & Davies Britannia depicta.
Alexander was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of Harry Alexander, a coachmaker. He was educated at Maidstone Grammar School, but in 1782, at the age of 15, moved to London to study art - first under William Pars, and subsequently Julius Caesar Ibbetson. In February 1784, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He assiduously applied himself to the mastery of his profession, obtaining the notice and approbation of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
In 1792, he was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy (published in 1797) In 1794 he returned to England and married Jane Wogan the following year. She died soon afterwards.
His other principal works were: Views of Headlands, Islands, etc. taken during the Voyage to China (1798); drawings based on Daniells sketches, for Vancouvers Voyage to the North Pacific Ocean (1798); and the descriptive plates to Sir John Barrows Travels in China (1804), and Voyage to Cochin China (1806). In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.
Besides his works as a draughtsman, he made several engravings - the principal one of which is a representation of the Festival given by the Earl of Romney to the Kentish Volunteers, on 1 August 1799, from his own drawing.
In 1802, Alexander was appointed professor of drawing at the Military College at Great Marlow, resigning in May 1808 to take up the post of assistant keeper of antiquities in the British Museum. In the years 1810, 1812, and 1815, he made drawings of the terra cottas and marbles in the Museum which were engraved and published in three volumes - the accompanying text being provided by Taylor Combe (keeper of the Department of Antiquities). Alexander had completed drawings for a fourth volume before his death.
He died at the house of his uncle in Maidstone in July 1816, and was buried in Boxley churchyard. He was described in one of his obituaries as a man of mild and unassuming manners, rich in the knowledge of art, and of unsullied integrity.

• Title : China - Plate 10....Published Jan. 1814 by J Murray, Albenarle Street 
• Date : 1814
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  25462
• Size: 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of a Chinese family eating by the side of the road - by William Alexander was published in the 1st 1814 - dated - edition of Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)
Plate size: - 9 1/2in x 7in (240mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - Light age toning
Verso: - None

Background: 
In 1792, Alexander was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy, published in 1797.
In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings, after his travels to China with The Earl of Macartney. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions. This publication was re-issued over the next twenty years in various languages including French.

Alexander, William 1767 – 1816
Alexander was an English painter, illustrator and engraver. The hallmarks of his work, usually executed in watercolours, were clearness and harmony of colour, simplicity and taste in composition, grace of outline, and delicacy of execution. He accompanied the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792. Prints of his work were reproduced from engravings. One his of works was used to illustrate Cadell & Davies Britannia depicta.
Alexander was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of Harry Alexander, a coachmaker. He was educated at Maidstone Grammar School, but in 1782, at the age of 15, moved to London to study art - first under William Pars, and subsequently Julius Caesar Ibbetson. In February 1784, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He assiduously applied himself to the mastery of his profession, obtaining the notice and approbation of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
In 1792, he was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy (published in 1797) In 1794 he returned to England and married Jane Wogan the following year. She died soon afterwards.
His other principal works were: Views of Headlands, Islands, etc. taken during the Voyage to China (1798); drawings based on Daniells sketches, for Vancouvers Voyage to the North Pacific Ocean (1798); and the descriptive plates to Sir John Barrows Travels in China (1804), and Voyage to Cochin China (1806). In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.
Besides his works as a draughtsman, he made several engravings - the principal one of which is a representation of the Festival given by the Earl of Romney to the Kentish Volunteers, on 1 August 1799, from his own drawing.
In 1802, Alexander was appointed professor of drawing at the Military College at Great Marlow, resigning in May 1808 to take up the post of assistant keeper of antiquities in the British Museum. In the years 1810, 1812, and 1815, he made drawings of the terra cottas and marbles in the Museum which were engraved and published in three volumes - the accompanying text being provided by Taylor Combe (keeper of the Department of Antiquities). Alexander had completed drawings for a fourth volume before his death.
He died at the house of his uncle in Maidstone in July 1816, and was buried in Boxley churchyard. He was described in one of his obituaries as a man of mild and unassuming manners, rich in the knowledge of art, and of unsullied integrity.

• Title : China - Plate 13....Published Jan. 1814 by J Murray, Albenarle Street (Plate XIII A Soldier with his Matchlock)
• Date : 1814
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  25464-1
• Size: 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of a Chinese soldier with his Matchlock rifle - accompanied by text - by William Alexander was published in the 1st 1814 - dated - edition of Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 13in x 11in (330mm x 280mm)
Plate size: - 9 1/2in x 7in (240mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - Light age toning
Verso: - None

Background: 
In 1792, Alexander was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy, published in 1797.
In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings, after his travels to China with The Earl of Macartney. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions. This publication was re-issued over the next twenty years in various languages including French.

Alexander, William 1767 – 1816
Alexander was an English painter, illustrator and engraver. The hallmarks of his work, usually executed in watercolours, were clearness and harmony of colour, simplicity and taste in composition, grace of outline, and delicacy of execution. He accompanied the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792. Prints of his work were reproduced from engravings. One his of works was used to illustrate Cadell & Davies Britannia depicta.
Alexander was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of Harry Alexander, a coachmaker. He was educated at Maidstone Grammar School, but in 1782, at the age of 15, moved to London to study art - first under William Pars, and subsequently Julius Caesar Ibbetson. In February 1784, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. He assiduously applied himself to the mastery of his profession, obtaining the notice and approbation of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
In 1792, he was appointed as one of the draughtsmen to the Macartney Embassy to China. He accompanied the Earl of Macartney to Peking where he made drawings for the plates which accompanied Sir George Stauntons account of the embassy (published in 1797) In 1794 he returned to England and married Jane Wogan the following year. She died soon afterwards.
His other principal works were: Views of Headlands, Islands, etc. taken during the Voyage to China (1798); drawings based on Daniells sketches, for Vancouvers Voyage to the North Pacific Ocean (1798); and the descriptive plates to Sir John Barrows Travels in China (1804), and Voyage to Cochin China (1806). In 1805 he published The Costume of China, illustrated by 48 coloured engravings. The work was so well-received that in 1814 he published another book titled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, illustrated in fifty colored engravings, with descriptions.
Besides his works as a draughtsman, he made several engravings - the principal one of which is a representation of the Festival given by the Earl of Romney to the Kentish Volunteers, on 1 August 1799, from his own drawing.
In 1802, Alexander was appointed professor of drawing at the Military College at Great Marlow, resigning in May 1808 to take up the post of assistant keeper of antiquities in the British Museum. In the years 1810, 1812, and 1815, he made drawings of the terra cottas and marbles in the Museum which were engraved and published in three volumes - the accompanying text being provided by Taylor Combe (keeper of the Department of Antiquities). Alexander had completed drawings for a fourth volume before his death.
He died at the house of his uncle in Maidstone in July 1816, and was buried in Boxley churchyard. He was described in one of his obituaries as a man of mild and unassuming manners, rich in the knowledge of art, and of unsullied integrity.

• Title : 36
• Date : 18th century
• Condition: (A) Very Good Condition
• Ref:  80772
• Size: 18in x 14in (460mm x 355mm)

Description:
This original wood-block engraved rare antique print of erotic Roman art, possibly reliefs from Pompeii, was engraved in the mid 18th century.
Beautifully engraved on strong, heavy, laid paper (no watermark) with a deep impression.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 18in x 14in (460mm x 355mm)
Plate size: - 12 1/2in x 7in (320mm x 180mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light soiling
Plate area: - Light soiling
Verso: - Light soiling, several small repairs, no loss

Background: 
Sexuality in ancient Rome, and more broadly, sexual attitudes and behaviors in ancient Rome, are indicated by Roman art, literature and inscriptions, and to a lesser extent by archaeological remains such as erotic artifacts and architecture. It has sometimes been assumed that unlimited sexual license was characteristic of ancient Rome; Verstraete and Provençal express the opinion that this perspective was simply a Christian interpretation: The sexuality of the Romans has never had good press in the West ever since the rise of Christianity. In the popular imagination and culture, it is synonymous with sexual license and abuse.
But sexuality was not excluded as a concern of the mos maiorum, the traditional social norms that affected public, private, and military life. Pudor, shame, modesty, was a regulating factor in behavior, as were legal strictures on certain sexual transgressions in both the Republican and Imperial periods. The censors—public officials who determined the social rank of individuals—had the power to remove citizens from the senatorial or equestrian order for sexual misconduct, and on occasion did so. The mid-20th-century sexuality theorist Michel Foucault regarded sex throughout the Greco-Roman world as governed by restraint and the art of managing sexual pleasure.
Roman society was patriarchal (see paterfamilias), and masculinity was premised on a capacity for governing oneself and others of lower status, not only in war and politics, but also in sexual relations. (Virtus), virtus, was an active masculine ideal of self-discipline, related to the Latin word for man, vir. The corresponding ideal for a woman was pudicitia, often translated as chastity or modesty, but a more positive and even competitive personal quality that displayed both her attractiveness and self-control. Roman women of the upper classes were expected to be well educated, strong of character, and active in maintaining their family\'s standing in society. But with extremely few exceptions, surviving Latin literature preserves the voices only of educated male Romans on the subject of sexuality. Visual art was created by those of lower social status and of a greater range of ethnicity, but was tailored to the taste and inclinations of those wealthy enough to afford it, including, in the Imperial era, former slaves.
Some sexual attitudes and behaviors in ancient Roman culture differ markedly from those in later Western societies. Roman religion promoted sexuality as an aspect of prosperity for the state, and individuals might turn to private religious practice or magic for improving their erotic lives or reproductive health. Prostitution was legal, public, and widespread. Pornographic paintings were featured among the art collections in respectable upperclass households. It was considered natural and unremarkable for men to be sexually attracted to teen-aged youths of both sexes, and pederasty was condoned as long as the younger male partner was not a freeborn Roman. Homosexual and heterosexual did not form the primary dichotomy of Roman thinking about sexuality, and no Latin words for these concepts exist. No moral censure was directed at the man who enjoyed sex acts with either women or males of inferior status, as long as his behaviors revealed no weaknesses or excesses, nor infringed on the rights and prerogatives of his masculine peers. While perceived effeminacy was denounced, especially in political rhetoric, sex in moderation with male prostitutes or slaves was not regarded as improper or vitiating to masculinity, if the male citizen took the active and not the receptive role. Hypersexuality, however, was condemned morally and medically in both men and women. Women were held to a stricter moral code, and same-sex relations between women are poorly documented, but the sexuality of women is variously celebrated or reviled throughout Latin literature. In general the Romans had more flexible gender categories than the ancient Greeks.
A late 20th-century paradigm analyzed Roman sexuality in terms of a penetrator–penetrated binary model, a misleadingly rigid analysis that may obscure expressions of sexuality among individual Romans. Even the relevance of the word sexuality to ancient Roman culture has been disputed, but in the absence of any other label for the cultural interpretation of erotic experience, the term continues to be used.

• Title : 7
• Date : 18th century
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  70525
• Size: 18in x 13 1/2in (460mm x 345mm)

Description:
This original wood-block engraved rare antique print of Bellona The Roman Goddess of War, seated with an Orb and Scroll, was engraved in the mid 18th century.
Beautifully engraved on strong laid paper (no watermark) with a deep impression.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 19in x 12in (485mm x 305mm)
Plate size: - 16in x 10 1/2in (410mm x 270mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light age toning
Plate area: - None
Verso: - Old tape reside, not affecting the image

Background: 
Bellona was an ancient Roman goddess of war. Her main attribute is the military helmet worn on her head.
Originally named Duellona in the Italic languages, the cult figure who became Bellona was an ancient Sabine goddess of war and identified with Nerio, the consort of the war god Mars - and later with her Greek equivalent Enyo. Her first temple in Rome was dedicated in 296 BCE, where her festival was celebrated on 3rd June. Her priests were known as Bellonarii and used to wound their own arms or legs as a blood sacrifice to her. These rites took place on 24th March, called the day of blood (dies sanguinis), after the ceremony. In consequence of this practice, which approximated to the rites dedicated to Cybele in Asia Minor, both Enyo and Bellona became identified with her Cappadocian aspect, Ma.
The Roman Campus Martius area, in which Bellona’s temple was sited, had extraterritorial status. Ambassadors from foreign states, who were not allowed to enter the city proper, stayed in this complex. The area around the temple of Bellona was considered to symbolise foreign soil, and there the Senate met with ambassadors and received victorious generals prior to their Triumphs. It was here too that Roman Senate meetings relating to foreign war were conducted. Beside the temple was the war column (columna bellica), which represented the boundary of Rome. To declare war on a distant state, a javelin was thrown over the column by one of the priests concerned with diplomacy (fetiales), from Roman territory toward the direction of the enemy land and this symbolical attack was considered the opening of war.
In the military cult of Bellona, she was associated with Virtus, the personification of valour. She then travelled outside Rome with the imperial legions and her temples have been recorded in France, Germany, Britain, and North Africa

• Title : Colly Molly Puff; Bonne Patisserie a Vendre; Torte e Pasticci
• Date : 1687
• Condition: (A) Very Good Condition
• Ref:  20722
• Size: 13in x 8in (330mm x 205mm) 

Description:
This original copper-plate engraved rare antique print of Colly Molly Puff , a well know street hawker known to Marcellus Laroon in Covent Garden - was engraved by John Savage for the first 1687 edition of Marcellus Laroons The Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life published by Pierce Tempest, London.
Originally there were 40 prints designed for the first edition that was quickly expanded to 74, this one of Colly Molly Puff was included in the original 40. This original print is printed on laid heavy paper.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 13in x 8in (330mm x 205mm)
Plate size: - 13in x 8in (330mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Age toning
Plate area: - Age toning
Verso: - Age toning

Background: 
Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both owned copies of Marcellus Laroons The Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life. Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroons Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. Marcellus Laroons Cries possessed more life than any that had gone before, reflecting the dynamic renaissance of the City at the end of the seventeenth century.
Previous Cries had been published with figures arranged in a grid upon a single page, but Laroon gave each subject their own page, thereby elevating the status of the prints as worthy of seperate frames. And such was their success among the bibliophiles of London, that Laroons original set of forty designs commissioned by the entrepreneurial bookseller Pierce Tempest in 1687 was quickly expanded to seventy-four and continued to be reprinted from the same plates until 1821. Living in Covent Garden from 1675, Laroon sketched his likenesses from life, drawing those he had come to know through his twelve years of residence there, and Pepys annotated eighteen of his copies of the prints with the names of those personalities of seventeenth century London street life that he recognised.
There is an appealing egalitarianism to Laroons work in which each individual is permitted their own space and dignity. With an unsentimental balance of stylisation and realism, all the figures are presented with grace and poise, even if they are wretched. Laroons designs were ink drawings produced under commission to the bookseller and consequently he achieved little personal reward or success from the exploitation of his creations, earning his living by painting the drapery for those more famous than he and then dying of consumption in Richmond at the age of forty-nine. But through widening the range of subjects of the Cries to include all social classes and well as preachers, beggars and performers, Marcellus Laroon left us us an exuberant and sympathetic vision of the range and multiplicity of human life that comprised the populace of London in his day.

John Savage (active 1683–1701) was an engraver and printseller in London. Savage was said to be French, and therefore may have been a Huguenot exile. He resided in Denmark Court, The Strand, until he purchased the plates and took over the business of Isaac Beckett at the Golden Head in the Old Bailey. Later he moved to the Golden Head in St. Paul\'s Churchyard, a hub of the publishing and printmaking industry near Doctors\' Commons.
Savage produced book illustrations and portraits which he published as frontispieces or separately, as well as playing and trade cards, and from 1683 he was the engraver of the plates for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Though he had bought Beckett\'s stock of mezzotint plates and continued to offer mezzotints, the plates he produced himself were only etchings and engravings.
Savage etched plates of Marcellus Laroon\'s Cries of London for the publisher Pierce Tempest. Only two – The Merry Fiddler and The London Quaker – bear Savages signature but Antony Griffiths, the former Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, attributes all 72 of the series to him.

Laroon, Marcellus 1653 - 1702
Marcellus Laroon was a Dutch-born painter and engraver, active in England. He provided the drawings for the popular series of prints The Cries of London.
He was born at The Hague, the son of Marcellus Lauron, a painter of French extraction who settled in the Netherlands. He began his artistic education with his father, who took him to be taken to England at an early age. According to brief biographies by Horace Walpole and Bainbrigg Buckeridge he was taught by one La Zoon before studying under one of the Flessiers, a family of Dutch painters and framemakers working in London in the mid-17th century.
He spent several years in Yorkshire and later told George Vertue that he had seen Rembrandt at Kingston upon Hull in 1661. He had settled in London by 1674, the year in which he became a member of the Painter-Stainers Company. He lived in Bow Street, Covent Garden. He was frequently employed to paint draperies for Sir Godfrey Kneller, and was well known as a copyist.
Laroon became known for small portraits and conversation pieces. He also painted small pictures, on humorous or free subjects, in the style of Egbert van Heemskerk, some of which were engraved in mezzotint by Isaac Beckett and John Smith. He also made some etchings and mezzotints on similar subjects himself. Buckeridge said of his painting.... When he came to work for himself, he made it his endeavour to follow nature very close, so that his manner was wholly his own. He was a general Painter, and imitated other masters hands exactly well. He painted well, both in great and little, and was an exact draftsman; but he was chiefly famous for drapery, wherein he exceeded most of his cotemporaries...
Laroon is best known for the drawings he made of The Cryes of London which were engraved by John Savage, and published by Pierce Tempest. He also drew the illustrations for The Art of Defence, a fencing manual by William Elder published in 1699 and the procession at the coronation of William III and Mary in 1689. He painted portraits of Queen Mary (engraved in mezzotint by Robert Williams), Caius Gabriel Cibber the sculptor, and others. Some drawings by him entered the collection of the British Museum.
He married the daughter of Jeremiah Keene, a builder, of Little Sutton, near Chiswick, by whom he had a large family, including three sons, who were brought up in his profession.
He died of consumption at Richmond, Surrey on 11 March 1702, and was buried there. He left a collection of pictures, which was sold by auction by his son Marcellus Laroon the Younger on 24 February 1725.

• Title : Die Statt Nordlingen
• Ref #:  33587
• Size: 17in x 15in (435mm x 380mm)
• Date : 1628
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition

Description:
This fine original wood block engraved antique map a birds eye view of the German town of Nördlingen in the Donau-Ries district, in Swabia, Bavaria,, was engraved by Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (RMD) in 1549 - dated - and published in the German Section of Sebastian Munsters 1628 edition of Cosmographia, Das ist: Beschreibung der gantzen Welt, Darinnen Aller Monarchien Keyserthumben, Königreichen, Fürstenthumben, Graff- und Herrschafften, Länderen, Stätten und Gemeinden.Ursprung (Cosmographia, that is: description of the whole world, in it all monarchies Keyser thumben, kingdoms, prince thumben, graff and herrschafften, countries, places and municipalities.)

Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (1525–1571) was a Swiss artist. He made several of the woodcuts for De re metallica (the metals and mining treatise by Georgius Agricola, the father of mineralogy) and for Sebastian Münsters Cosmographia.
Deutschs father, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (the Elder), and Deutsch\'s brother, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch the Younger, were also artists. The elder Niklaus had taken the last name Manuel, but all three also commonly used Deutsch as part of their names and signed their paintings with initials ending in D.

Nördlingen is a town in the Donau-Ries district, in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany. The town was the location of two battles during the Thirty Years\' War, which took place between 1618–1648. Today it is one of only three towns in Germany that still has a completely established city wall, the other two being Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 17in x 15in (435mm x 380mm)
Plate size: - 17in x 15in (435mm x 380mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (10mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light offsetting
Plate area: - Light offsetting
Verso: - Light offsetting

Background: 
Cosmographia, Das ist: Beschreibung der gantzen Welt, Darinnen Aller Monarchien Keyserthumben, Königreichen, Fürstenthumben, Graff- und Herrschafften, Länderen, Stätten und Gemeinden.Ursprung, Regiment, Reichthumb, Gewalt und.Beschaffenheit. Dessgleichen Aller deren, beyder Ständen, Regenten: Keysern, Königen, Bäpsten, Bischoffen.Genealogien und Stammbäumen.zusammen getragen. by Sebastian Münster was first published in 1544 and is the earliest German-language description of the world. It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French (translated by François de Belleforest), Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after Munsters death. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the notable woodcuts (some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, and David Kandel). It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe. Among the notable maps within Cosmographia is the map Tabula novarum insularum, which is credited as the first map to show the American continents as geographically discrete.
Munsters earlier geographic works were Germania descriptio (1530) and Mappa Europae (1536). In 1540, he published a Latin edition of Ptolemys Geographia with illustrations.

• Title : Belgium or the Netherlands divided into Departments
• Date : 1808
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  24329-1
• Size: 20in x 16in (510mm x 405mm)

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original antique map of Belgium & the southern Netherlands was engraved by John Neele in 1808 - the date is engraved at the foot of the map - and published in the 1810 edition of The Modern Royal Atlas. (Ref: Tooley; M&B)

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 20in x 16in (510mm x 405mm)
Plate size: - 16½in x 15in (420mm x 380mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light creasing
Plate area: - Light creasing, light wear along bottom centerfold
Verso: - None

Background: 
The name Belgium is derived from Gallia Belgica, a Roman province in the northernmost part of Gaul that before Roman invasion in 100 BC, was inhabited by the Belgae, a mix of Celtic and Germanic peoples. A gradual immigration by Germanic Frankish tribes during the 5th century brought the area under the rule of the Merovingian kings. A gradual shift of power during the 8th century led the kingdom of the Franks to evolve into the Carolingian Empire.
The Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the region into Middle and West Francia and therefore into a set of more or less independent fiefdoms which, during the Middle Ages, were vassals either of the King of France or of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Many of these fiefdoms were united in the Burgundian Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries. Emperor Charles V extended the personal union of the Seventeen Provinces in the 1540s, making it far more than a personal union by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 and increased his influence over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège.
The Eighty Years\' War (1568–1648) divided the Low Countries into the northern United Provinces (Belgica Foederata in Latin, the Federated Netherlands) and the Southern Netherlands (Belgica Regia, the Royal Netherlands). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Following the campaigns of 1794 in the French Revolutionary Wars, the Low Countries—including territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liège—were annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon.

Neele, Samuel John 1758–1824
Samuel John Neele was a cartographer, copper-plate engraver and printer with business in the Strand, London.
Also father of Henry Neele the English poet and literary scholar.

• Title : Map of the Kingdom of New Granada and the Countries adjacent from Panama to Guayquil
• Date : 1824
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  01-9624
• Size: 17 1/2in x 10 1/2in (445mm x 270mm)

Description:
This large highly detailed original copper-plate engraved antique map of north west South America - from Panama to Peru - was engraved by Sydney Hall and published in the 1824 edition of the Rev. Dr Robertsons The History of America. (Ref: M&B; Tooley)

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - 
Colors used: - 
General color appearance: - 
Paper size: - 17 1/2in x 10 1/2in (445mm x 270mm)
Plate size: - 17 1/2in x 10 1/2in (445mm x 270mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - Folds as issued
Verso: - None

Background: 
In 1494, Portugal and Spain, the two great maritime European powers of that time, on the expectation of new lands being discovered in the west, signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, by which they agreed, with the support of the Pope, that all the land outside Europe should be an exclusive duopoly between the two countries.
The treaty established an imaginary line along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, roughly 46° 37\\\' W. In terms of the treaty, all land to the west of the line (known to comprise most of the South American soil) would belong to Spain, and all land to the east, to Portugal. As accurate measurements of longitude were impossible at that time, the line was not strictly enforced, resulting in a Portuguese expansion of Brazil across the meridian.
Beginning in the 1530s, the people and natural resources of South America were repeatedly exploited by foreign conquistadors, first from Spain and later from Portugal. These competing colonial nations claimed the land and resources as their own and divided it in colonies.
European infectious diseases (smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus) – to which the native populations had no immune resistance – caused large-scale depopulation of the native population under Spanish control. Systems of forced labor, such as the haciendas and mining industry\\\'s mita also contributed to the depopulation. After this, African slaves, who had developed immunities to these diseases, were quickly brought in to replace them.
The Spaniards were committed to converting their native subjects to Christianity and were quick to purge any native cultural practices that hindered this end; however, many initial attempts at this were only partially successful, as native groups simply blended Catholicism with their established beliefs and practices. Furthermore, the Spaniards brought their language to the degree they did with their religion, although the Roman Catholic Churchs evangelization in Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní actually contributed to the continuous use of these native languages albeit only in the oral form.
Eventually, the natives and the Spaniards interbred, forming a mestizo class. At the beginning, many mestizos of the Andean region were offspring of Amerindian mothers and Spanish fathers. After independence, most mestizos had native fathers and European or mestizo mothers.
Many native artworks were considered pagan idols and destroyed by Spanish explorers; this included many gold and silver sculptures and other artifacts found in South America, which were melted down before their transport to Spain or Portugal. Spaniards and Portuguese brought the western European architectural style to the continent, and helped to improve infrastructures like bridges, roads, and the sewer system of the cities they discovered or conquered. They also significantly increased economic and trade relations, not just between the old and new world but between the different South American regions and peoples. Finally, with the expansion of the Portuguese and Spanish languages, many cultures that were previously separated became united through that of Latin American.
Guyana was first a Dutch, and then a British colony, though there was a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars when it was colonized by the French. The country was once partitioned into three parts, each being controlled by one of the colonial powers until the country was finally taken over fully by the British.
The European Peninsular War (1807–1814), a theater of the Napoleonic Wars, changed the political situation of both the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. First, Napoleon invaded Portugal, but the House of Braganza avoided capture by escaping to Brazil. Napoleon also captured King Ferdinand VII of Spain, and appointed his own brother instead. This appointment provoked severe popular resistance, which created Juntas to rule in the name of the captured king.
Many cities in the Spanish colonies, however, considered themselves equally authorized to appoint local Juntas like those of Spain. This began the Spanish American wars of independence between the patriots, who promoted such autonomy, and the royalists, who supported Spanish authority over the Americas. The Juntas, in both Spain and the Americas, promoted the ideas of the Enlightenment. Five years after the beginning of the war, Ferdinand VII returned to the throne and began the Absolutist Restoration as the royalists got the upper hand in the conflict.
The independence of South America was secured by Simón Bolívar (Venezuela) and José de San Martín (Argentina), the two most important Libertadores. Bolívar led a great uprising in the north, then led his army southward towards Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Meanwhile, San Martín led an army across the Andes Mountains, along with Chilean expatriates, and liberated Chile. He organized a fleet to reach Peru by sea, and sought the military support of various rebels from the Vice-royalty of Peru. The two armies finally met in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where they cornered the Royal Army of the Spanish Crown and forced its surrender.
In the Portuguese Kingdom of Brazil, Dom Pedro I (also Pedro IV of Portugal), son of the Portuguese King Dom João VI, proclaimed the independent Kingdom of Brazil in 1822, which later became the Empire of Brazil. Despite the Portuguese loyalties of garrisons in Bahia, Cisplatina and Pará, independence was diplomatically accepted by the crown in Portugal in 1825, on condition of a high compensation paid by Brazil mediatized by the United Kingdom.

Robertson , William 1721 - 1793
Rev Robertson was a Scottish historian, minister in the Church of Scotland, and Principal of the University of Edinburgh. The thirty years during which he presided over the University perhaps represent the highest point in its history. He made significant contributions to the writing of Scottish history and the history of Spain and Spanish America.
Robertson was born at the manse of Borthwick, Midlothian, the son of Robertson the local minister.
He was educated at Borthwick Parish School and Dalkeith Grammar School. He was the son of William Robertson and his wife Eleanor Pitcairn. He married his cousin Mary Nesbit in 1751. The family moved to Edinburgh when his father became appointed minister of Old Greyfriars Kirk.
He studied divinity at Edinburgh University (1733–41), and was licensed to preach in 1741. He was granted a Doctor of Divinity in 1759. He became minister at Gladsmuir (East Lothian) in 1743 and in 1759 at Lady Yester\\\'s Kirk and Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. A staunch Presbyterian and Whig, he volunteered to defend the city against the Jacobites led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745.
In 1754 he was an original member of The Select Society, also referred to as the Edinburgh Select Society.
Robertson became royal chaplain to George III (1761), principal of the University of Edinburgh (1762), Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1763, and Historiographer Royal in 1764, reviving a role within the Royal household in Scotland that had been in abeyance from 1709 until 1763. He was also a member of The Poker Club.
One of his most notable works is his History of Scotland 1542–1603, begun in 1753 and first published in 1759. Robertson also contributed to the history of Spain and Spanish America in his History of America (1777), the first sustained attempt to describe the discovery, conquest and settlement of Spanish America since Herreras Décadas and his biography of Charles V. In that work he had provided a masterly survey of the progress of European society, in which he traced the erosion of the feudal system caused by the rise of free towns, the revival of learning and Roman law, and by the emergence of royal authority and the balance of power between states. It was the development of commerce, assisted by law and private property, which was held to be chiefly responsible for the advance in civilisation.
He was a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and also of the moderates in the Church of Scotland.
In 1783 he was a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
He died of jaundice on 11 June 1793, at Grange House in south Edinburgh (the huge now-demolished mansion which gave its name to the Grange district. Robertson is buried at Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. The grave is within a very large stone mausoleum. second only to William Adam\\\'s mausoleum immediately to the south. Both stand to the south-west of the church, near the entrance to the Covenanters Prison.

Publications
- The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ\\\'s Appearance (sermon) (1755)
The History of Scotland 1542-1603 (1759) (3 vols.)
- History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) (4 vols.)
- The History of America (1777, 1796) (3 vols.)
- An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India (1791)

• Title : Le Jabiru, de Cayenne
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23505

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804