Paris, Simon le Moyne, 1635.

4to [226 x 165 mm] of (8) ll. 238 pp. including 68 full-page plates, (1) l. of privilege, lower white margin of the title restored not affecting the text. Full shipskin, spines ribbed and decorated, red morocco lettering-piece, red edges. 18th century binding.

First edition of the first book on the flora of Canada, one of the earliest herbaria in north America.

Its importance was recognized by Linnaeus, who still consulted it for his classification work some hundred years after its publication.

Hunt, R.M.M. Botanical books, 227. Hunt 227; Nissen, BBI 406; Pritzel 1894; Stafleu & Cowan 1233.

Imbued with the renaissance herbalist tradition, Canadensium Plantarum Historia is already distinguished by its modern classification: The book contains the very first descriptions of 78 plants of the Canadian flora by the Parisian botanist and physician Jacques-Philippe Cornut (1606-1651).

Cornut was a French botanist and physician who never visited North America, but instead received the majority of his plant specimens from the Robins family, who supervised the gardens of Henry IV and the garden of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, and the Morin family, who owned several Parisian commercial nurseries.

This book is emblematic of the tradition of medicinal herbology, visible through the engraved representations of the roots, and is also characteristic of the seventeenth-century infatuation with botany, which can be seen in the author's horticultural observations.

The superb…

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