The Aurelian Legacy British Butterflies and Their Collectors

About this book

Please note that the 2016 version by Third Millennium Press is not a reprint. They received the remaining stock after Harley Books went out of business and have stickered a new ISBN over the back of the dustjacket; the books themselves are the originals published by Harley Books in 2000.

Although the collecting of butterflies is today an emotive subject, it is impossible to separate a history of British butterflies from a history of their collectors, without whose activities our knowledge of the identification, occurrence, distribution and variation of British butterflies would be much the poorer. This entertaining and informative book charts the history of British butterflies and their collectors since the seventeenth century, a time when serious interest in natural history had its beginnings. It contains brief biographies, with contemporary portraits where available, of 101 deceased lepidopterists, generously laced with anecdotes and quotations from their own and others' accounts of their exploits. In addition to the numerous monochrome figures, The Aurelian Legacy includes colour plates by 14 artists of British butterflies from Petiver to Frohawk (including two illustrations never previously reproduced), as well as colour photographs of historic specimens.

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