[PLATYPUS] Les animaux remarquables.

Tours : Alfred Mame et fils, 1879. Duodecimo (150 x 95 mm), publisher’s papered boards with gilt embossed decoration and pictorial chromolithographed onlay to upper board; front free-endpaper with early French school prize inscription of the Châteaubriant École communale (awarded to Alexandre Guibert for Calculus); pp. 107, [1], with a lithographed frontispiece plate; a fine example.

A child’s natural history containing a collection of descriptions of unusual and exotic animals. These include a five-page chapter on the Ornithorhynchus (platypus). In 1879, when this book has published, the true taxonomy of this creature, which had perplexed scientists for the better part of a century, had not yet been determined. It would not be until 1884 that the riddle of the animal’s mode of reproduction was finally solved, when William Caldwell, a Darwinian evolutionist, established that both the platypus and the echidna are teatless, egg laying mammals which suckle their young – the evolutionary link between reptiles and mammals.

Trove locates no copies in Australian libraries.