Details
BOUCHER DE CRVECOEUR DE PERTHES, Jacques (1788-1868). Antiquits celtiques et antdiluviennes. Mmoire sur l'industrie primitive et les arts leur origine. Paris: Treuttel & Wurtz and others, 1847-1864.
3 volumes. 8o (251 x 166 mm). 136 lithographed plates (occasional very minor spotting). Original blue printed wrappers, uncut and largely unopened.
FIRST EDITION, second issue of Volume I with "1849" on the front wrapper and "1847" on the title. In the 1840s, Boucher discovered extensive deposits of flint implements in strata containing the fossil evidence of mammoths and other extinct animals. He concluded that man had been a contemporary of these species, and thus of far greater antiquity than previously supposed. His findings were initially widely ridiculed, by Charles Darwin amongst others, but by 1859 it was accepted that, as Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell "he had done for man something like what Agassiz (see lot 888) has done for glaciers". VERY RARE in the original printed wrappers. Garrison-Morton 203.9; PMM 325; Norman 282. (3)
3 volumes. 8
FIRST EDITION, second issue of Volume I with "1849" on the front wrapper and "1847" on the title. In the 1840s, Boucher discovered extensive deposits of flint implements in strata containing the fossil evidence of mammoths and other extinct animals. He concluded that man had been a contemporary of these species, and thus of far greater antiquity than previously supposed. His findings were initially widely ridiculed, by Charles Darwin amongst others, but by 1859 it was accepted that, as Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell "he had done for man something like what Agassiz (see lot 888) has done for glaciers". VERY RARE in the original printed wrappers. Garrison-Morton 203.9; PMM 325; Norman 282. (3)