Pacifique

1904 — 8vo [23 x 15 cm]; xxiv, 424 pp, frontis, 61 illustrations including many full-page, mostly from photos, 3 folding maps, some drawings, index. original pictorial cloth, gilt spine title lettering and gilt picture on front cover, top edge gilted, endpaper bookplate, no tears of maps, near fine and clean. A picture of this book is available upon request by email. An important book by one of the great botanical explorers and naturalists of the nineteenth century, the Italian botanist, spent time at Kew, where he met Charles Darwin, William Joseph Hooker and James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak. The latter lead him to spending 3 years from 1865 to 1868 undertaking research in Sarawak, Brunei and other islands off present-day Malaysia and New Guinea, where he discovered many new species of palms, and many other plants such as a phosphorescent fungus that was bright enough to read a newspaper placed by it. Beccari was in Sarawak during 1865-67 where he collected over 800 bird skins including 40 not previously discovered of unrecorded species. He describes nature, the people, Dyaks and their customs in some detail, prior to the major impacts of the twentieth century, and describes his return to Sarawak some 20 years later, where he formed a botanical garden. He discovered the titan arum, the plant with the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, in Sumatra in 1878. This edition also contains the valuable and detailed appendix on the forests of Borneo, which are currently being logged to extinction. The preface is by naturalist F. H. H. Guillemard who also wrote a book of his travels in the area. The later reprint does not include the maps of the original.