La Haye: J. Kips, J. Hz. et W. P. Stockum, 1837. Folio, 21 uncoloured plates, three double page maps, one double page table, one large folding table. Binder's cloth, a few spots throughout, very scarce.

Hermann Schlegel (1804-1884) was a prominent German ornithologist and herpetologist who started his working life as assistant to Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Director of the Natural History Museum of Leiden and ultimately succeeding Temminck. Schlegel befriended Philipp Franz von Siebold and he collaborated with him on Fauna Japonica (1845-1850). He also started the careers of three of the greatest natural history illustrators of the nineteenth century; John Gerrard Keulemans, Joseph Smit and Joseph Wolf. He was a gifted scientist who asked fundamental questions of biogeography and systematics and was the first to employ a trinomial system of nomenclature, even though he was an opponent of Darwinism.

"Schlegel's most famous herpetological work was the Essai sur la physionomie des serpens, issued in 1837. This was the first truly scientific treatise on snakes. Although it contained valuable descriptions of species, based on the rich Leiden collection and Schlegel's personal examination of the major European collections, his classification scheme never gained wide acceptance and was soon overshadowed by snake volumes published by A. -M.-C. Dumeril. Gabriel Bibron, and Auguste Dumeril (1844,1853,1854). Nevertheless, Schlegel's book was important enough to be translated into English by T. S. Trail, in 1843." (Adler, Kraig, editor. Contributions to the history of herpetology, volume one, 1989 pp. 30-31).

BM(NH) p. 1838; Nissen ZVB: 3684.