Perry's Arcana

Description:

From 1810 to 1811, the English stonemason and amateur naturalist George Perry published a lavishly illustrated magazine on natural history. The Arcana or Museum of Nature ran to 22 monthly parts, with 84 extraordinary hand-coloured plates and over 300 text pages describing mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, mollusks, echinoderms, insects, trilobites and plants, alongside travelogues from far-off lands. It presented the first published illustration of the koala and many new genera and species, but astonishingly was then largely forgotten for nearly two hundred years. Perry’s work was deliberately ignored by his contemporaries in England, as he was a supporter of Lamarck rather than Linnaeus, and the Arcana’s rarity—only thirteen complete copies are known – has helped maintain its shroud of mystery