Balfour, Francis Maitland. The Works of Francis Maitland Balfour (4 volume set); Edited by M. Foster, M.R.S. and Adam Sedgwick, M.A. London: MacMillan and Co., 1885. Memorial Edition. [6397]
Four volumes in half morocco with pebble cloth boards, raised bands to spines with gilt rules, bindings scuffed; the plate volume with some blotchy stains to the binding. Top page edges in gilt, marbled end papers. Vol. I. paste repair to front outer hinge & top of backstrip, all other outer hinges fine. This is an ex-library set with clean spines (no library labels), having bookplates, date due slips and labels on the rear end papers, ink name stamps on the title pages and a few text pages.
Lithographed frontispiece portrait, vii., 922; xi., 583, xxiii.; xi., 792, xxiv.; lx., 53 lithograph plates, most are double page and in colors. Hundreds of text illustrations in the set. Includes the scarce plates volume. Good. Hardcover.
Volume I. - Separate Memoirs
Volume II. - A Treatise on Comparative Embryology, Invertebrata
Volume III. - A Treatise on Comparative Embryology, Vertebrata
Volume IV. - Plates
Francis Maitland Balfour (1851-1882), b. Edinburgh, d. climbing Mount Blanc, France. Balfour was one of the brightest minds in biology during his lifetime, second only to Charles Darwin, who praised Balfour's work. "This book [Comparative Embryology] displayed a vigorous scientific imagination, always controlled by a logical sense that rigidly distinguished between proved fact and mere hypothesis, and it at once won wide recognition, not only as an admirable digest of the numberless observations made with regard to the development of animals during the quarter of a century preceding its publication, but also on account of the large amount of original research incorporated in its pages." - Encyclopedia Britannica (1911).
