# 45981
BULLER, Walter Lawry, 1838-1906; KEULEMANS, John Gerrard, 1842-1912
Manual of the birds of New Zealand
$600.00 AUD
Wellington : George Didsbury, Government Printer, 1882. Octavo, gilt-lettered binder’s cloth (corners bumped, wear to head and foot of spine), pp. xii; 107; [blank]; iii (list of publications); [blank], illustrated with 39 black and white lithographs on tinted blocks, previous owner’s name to endpaper, a couple of occasional spots of foxing, internally clean.
Sir Walter Lawry Buller was born at the Wesleyan mission, Newark, at Pakanae in the Hokianga in 1838, the son of Methodist missionary Rev. James Buller. In 1854 the family moved to Wellington where he was befriended by naturalist William Swainson. Buller trained as a lawyer but is best known for his contribution to ornithology in New Zealand.
In 1871 F. W. Hutton’s Catalogue of the Birds of New Zealand was published in Wellington, ‘prepared by direction of Dr. Hector, with the view of enabling naturalists in New Zealand to name correctly any bird whose habits they may have noticed, and so render their observations useful to science’ (from the Introduction).
In 1873, Walter Lawry Buller’s A history of the birds of New Zealand was published, which won Buller much critical acclaim, including from Charles Darwin, and for it he was awarded the CMG in 1875. ‘It has been remarked by a celebrated naturalist that “New Zealand is the most interesting ornithological province in the world … It has been the author’s desire to collect and place on record a complete life-history of these birds before their final extirpation’ (prospectus to the first edition of 1873).
With Hutton’s 1871 Catalogue ‘having been long out of print, and there being a general demand for something to take its place, Dr. Buller has prepared the following Manual for the use of students in the colony, in anticipation of a more comprehensive work on this subject which he has in progress’ – Preface. This Manual was published in 1882, and reproduces by photo-lithography Keuleman’s preparatory drawings made for the 1873 A history of the birds of New Zealand, in addition to woodcut figures in the text.
In 1888, a second edition of Buller’s A history of the birds of New Zealand was published in two volumes and with two later supplementary volumes. It was even more ambitious in scope than any of the previous works; “The book itself is on a larger scale, being Imperial instead of Royal quarto, and the plates, instead of being handcoloured lithographs, have been produced by the more costly but more exact and satisfactory process of printing in colours’.
Thus Buller’s Manual of the birds of New Zealand has significance not only as a record of New Zealand’s bird life at the time, but for the history of Buller’s more significant illustrated records, both the 1873 first edition and 1888 second edition, with supplements.