JAN COMMELIN'S MONOGRAPH ON CAPE FLORA

First Edition: 111 pages, frontispiece, 42 plates some folding, brown simulated leather titled gilt on upper cover and spine, a very good copy.

One of an edition limited to 350 copies.

From the introduction: 'The work is a manuscript by Jan Commelin, written between 1687 and 1692 but never published. It is based on flora illustrated during the 1685-1686 expedition by Simon van der Stel to the Copper Mountains. The original is in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. It is bound in vellum and consists of 84 leaves, 20/21 x 15/16 cm. The attribution to Jan Commelin is based on the handwriting and on the format of the text. Commelin’s method follows that of John Ray’s Methodus (1682), which he also used in his Horti medici Amstelodamensis (1689) and in his annotations of Van Reede’s Hortus Malabaricus Indicus and his remarks on the food plants provided by the Almighty to the Hottentots are also in Ray’s physico-theological vein. Prior to 1682, Commelin followed the system of Caspar Bauhin.......

'The copyist of the drawings is not known. It could have been Jan Moninckx, who did water-colours for the Horti medici Amstelodamensis from 1686 and drawings in ink from 1691. Another possibility is Stephanus Cousyns, who probably copied the drawings sent by Bacx and Van der Stel. A set of such copies was sent by Huydecoper to Jacob Breyne in 1683 and published by the latter’s son, Johann Philip, in 1739. Recently, photographs of three drawings and a text-page, copied from the journal, have been pasted in the volume behind Commelin’s.

'It is not known how and when the manuscript arrived in Berlin. The Director of the Staatsbibliothek, Oberrat Dr Peter Jörg Becker wrote ‘Little can be said on the acquisition of the manuscript by the Library; it belongs to the old collections and arrived probably in the eighteenth century in the Library which was called Königliche Bibliothek Berlin since 1701, which was founded in 1661 as Kurfürstliche Bibliothek’.'