Natural History
In 1945 the University of Kansas received its first gift of a major collection of rare materials with the bequest by Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr. (1908-1945) of his extraordinary collection of ornithological books and manuscripts: over 15,000 volumes, as well as several thousand pamphlets, letters, original drawings, manuscripts, and other materials, perhaps a third concerned purely with ornithology, including a great many items which are rare or in some way unique. Another third is devoted to voyages and travels (mainly scientific expeditions, including considerable ornithological data), and the remainder is made up of other natural history together with a useful bibliographical collection. Ellis, a California collector and ornithologist, formed his library from 1930 to 1945, with a particularly intense period of collecting in 1936 and 1937 in London where he worked with the booksellers Sotheran, Quaritch, and Wheldon and Wesley. His collecting continued up to his death, with many of his acquisitions coming from the California booksellers John Howell, Dawson's, and Zeitlin and VerBrugge, and from H.P. Kraus and the Anderson Galleries of New York.
While the most obviously striking items from the Ellis Collection are certainly the great illustrated folios such as Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (present in five variant editions and issues), it is not for the beauty of the illustrative art but for their contribution to scientific knowledge that the books are valued in this collection. William Turner's Avium Praecipuarum . . . Historia (Cologne, 1544)—the earliest of countless books on birds written by Englishmen, the first serious criticism of classical ornithologists and the first scientific book on birds—and many other 16th through 18th century writers (Belon, John Ray, and Edwards, for example) represent the scientific spirit of the pre-Linnaean ornithologists. Notable examples from the post-Linnaean period are Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology (Philadelphia, 1808-1814) which marks the beginning of serious American ornithology, Darwin's On the Origin of Species (the first edition of 1859 and the five subsequent editions revised during Darwin's lifetime as well as many later editions), and works of such scientists as Phillips, Max Fürbringer, and Benjamin Smith Barton. Work on a catalogue of the ornithological portions of the Ellis Collection was begun by Robert M. Mengel in the early 1950s; volumes covering authors A-D have been published.
The acquisition of the Ellis Collection in 1945 brought the Library what was reputed to be the most extensive collection of works by and about the great 18th century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus in the hands of any private collector in the United States. Ellis himself stated that the next best collection of Linnaeus belonged to "a botany professor in Nebraska". The acquisition in 1953 of the botanical part of the collection of Prof. T. J. Fitzpatrick bore out Ellis's estimate, including Linnaeus holdings almost equal in number to those in the Ellis collection. The combination of the Linnaeus materials from these two collections—a literal combination in some cases, such as the 10th edition of the Systema naturae (1758-1759), the first volume of which is from the Ellis Collection and the second from Fitzpatrick—produced the best collection in the United States, not surpassed or equalled until the acquisition of Birger Strandell's wonderful Linnaeus library by the Hunt Botanical Library in Pittsburgh.
Today the Spencer Library Linnaeus collection, developed by the professional attention of Sally Haines, the department's botanical specialist, includes well over two thousand volumes containing a much larger number of individual works by and about Linnaeus. Nearly all of his major works are here in many editions, of which a hundred or more are first editions. Particularly notable are the various editions of the Systema Naturae, a complete set of the Linnaean dissertations in their first editions, a splendid copy of the Hortus Cliffortianus (1737), the first edition, first and second issues, of the Species plantarum (1753), the work in which Linnaeus first applied binomial nomenclature to botany, and the scarce first edition of Pehr Kalm's En Resa till Norra America (1753-1761). The collection also includes long runs of the journals published by the principal Linnaean societies, many biographical works, and early editions of works by Linnaeus' disciples and contemporaries.
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2. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1808-1814.
Plate 42, "Red Owl, Warbling Flycatcher, Purple Finch, and Brown Lark", from a volume of the author's proof plates, inscribed on the front pastedown endpaper "This volume contains the first impression of Wilson's plates for his own use & correction." [underline sic].
The Ellis Collection also includes complete sets of the first edition of the American Ornithology, with the first volume in both first and second issues, and of seven later editions.
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3. The comparative anatomy of the avian and human skeletons, pp. 40 and 41 of Pierre Belon's L'histoire de la nature des oyseaux, Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1555. Belon's book is one of the four major ornithological works of the renaissance; the Ellis Collection has all four: Belon, William Turner's Avium praecipuarum ... historia (1544), the third book of Conrad Gesner's Historia animalium (1555), and Aldrovandus' Ornithologia (1599-1603). Collections cause collecting. This is one of the important additions made to the Ellis Collection by the Library, acquired by Joseph Rubinstein and added to the collection on 20 November 1957.
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Of particular note in the Ellis Collection are the remarkable works of John Gould, one of the 19th century's most notable ornithological illustrators. In addition to all of Gould's major works, the Ellis Collection has ninety percent of the world's surviving Gould drawings and paintings— amounting to over 2,000 sketches, annotated drawings, water-colors (both rough and highly-finished), tissue drawings and tracings, and twelve lithographic stones, almost all acquired by Ralph Ellis from H. Sotheran in 1936/37. Significant additions to this archive have been made over the past 25 years by gifts and purchases from Dr. Gordon C. Sauer of Kansas City, a number of drawings acquired from Christie's, and the purchase from H.P. Kraus of two volumes of Gould drawings once owned by Sir William Jardine, 1800-1874.
4. John Gould, Chlorostilbon Portmanni (Poortman's Emerald hummingbird). The extensive annotations by Gould on this drawing indicate changes of detail and positioning. Large letters like the "J" appear on a number of the drawings but their significance has not yet been discovered. The reference "3-4276" indicates the particular plate in Curtis' Botanical Magazine which was used as the authority for the Victoria regia waterlily. Gould's annotation "raise here and copy Photograph more" is somewhat puzzling—presumably in addition to the engraving from Curtis he used a photograph.
5. John Gould, A Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Hummingbirds, London, 1849-1861, 5v. Shown here is plate 358 in v.5, 1861 (published 1860). The name of this bird from the neighborhood of Bogota should be Poortmanni rather than Portmanni. From the collection of Ralph Ellis, acquired by him from H. Sotheran.
The technical problems of representing the iridescent colors of hummingbird plumage in his illustrations exercised Gould's ingenuity until he developed a process involving the use of gold leaf which provides a remarkable glowing realism in his pictures. He displayed his own collection of mounted specimens of hummingbirds—his favorite birds—in a pavilion in the London Zoological Gardens during the Great Exhibition of 1851. 5,378 of his specimens, which his daughter said were forcing the Goulds out of their house, were sold to the British Museum after his death.
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6. Carl von Linné, Systema naturae, Lugduni Batavorum: T. Haak, 1735. The first edition of Linnaeus' epoch-making Systema Naturae. This remarkably fine copy in an ingenious binding (only half as wide as the paper, allowing the broadsheet book to befolded vertically for easy carrying), is one of approximately thirty surviving copies. During his lifetime, Linnaeus published twelve editions of this monumental work. By 1766, when the twelfth edition was published, the taxonomic text had grown from the seven broadsheets of the first edition to 2,300 pages.
Acquired in 1960 from the University of Helsinki Library through the efforts of Oswald P. Backus, III, KU professor of History and Law, one of a number of faculty book selectors who helped build the collections.
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7. and 8. Inula helenium, or Fleabane (Elenium), original woodblock designed and cut by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck for the 1562 and 1565 editions of Pietro Andrea Mattioli's Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei de materia medica.
This block is from the only surviving series of original blocks representing the great folio woodcut-illustrated scientific books of the mid-sixteenth century.
Gift of Katherine E. Stannard in memory of Jerry Stannard, professor of the History of Science at the University of Kansas. Acquired in 1989 from Alecto Historical Editions.
Shown with the block is its image as printed in T.J. Fitzpatrick's copy (exhibit 8) of the Commentarii (Venetiis: Ex officina Valgrisiana, 1565. Summerfield E696), acquired by Fitzpatrick in 1923 from Emile Nourry of Paris; with an 18th century pharmacist's bookplate: Martin Apot. place aux Bleds.
In 1953, Robert Vosper, then University Librarian, learned from the Kansas City bookseller, Frank Glenn, of the availability of the library of Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had been a botanist on the faculty of the University of Nebraska for many years, never completing his Ph.D., always ill-paid (never more than $1800 a year), producing over 200 scientific articles and books, and building one of the largest private collections in the history of botany in America. His interests were not restricted to botany, but ranged into other scientific and historical subjects. When he died in 1952 at the age of 83, he left his executor with the nightmare of dealing with 90 tons of very precious paper. The 10,000 volumes of scientific books and manuscripts which the University of Kansas Libraries acquired included, in addition to his Linnaeus collection, an excellent small collection of the English natural historians John Ray and Francis Willughby; an important collection of the works of the American biologist C.S. Rafinesque, including a fine copy of his Caratteri di alcuni nuovi generi e nuove specie di animali e piante della Sicilia (Palermo, 1810), his rare single-issue journal, Annals of Nature (Lexington, Ky., 1820), and complete runs of periodical ventures such as his Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1832-1833); various works by Newton and many of the early herbalists. In American science the most notable holdings are in botany, the work of such men as William Darlington, Jacob Bigelow, Thomas Nuttall, and Stephen Elliot.
The department's holdings in botany began with the Fitzpatrick acquisition but have not, especially in the case of the early herbals, stopped there. With the Fitzpatrick library we acquired Brunfels, Chabrey, a delightful hand-coloured Dioscorides of 1543, Evelyn's Silva, Fuchs, Gesner, and Nehemiah Grew, to give only a few samples of the wealth of this acquisition. Our continuing interest is demonstrated by the presence in our stacks of the 1517 Hortus Sanitatis, the L'Ecluse Rariorum Plantarum Historia (Antwerp, 1601), many 16th century editions of Mattioli on Dioscorides, Dalechamps' Historia Generalis Plantarum (Lyon, 1586-1587), L'Heritier de Brutelle's Sertum Anglicanum (1788-1792), Horace Walpole's Essay on Modern Gardening (1785), and very many others.