A lovely copy of this rare work on the Minke Whale, here referred to by the now obsolete classification of Balaena rostrata Fabr. var. major. The beauty of this work is the elegant engraving by G. Eduard Müller in Berlin.

A lovely copy of this rare work on the Minke Whale, here referred to by the now obsolete classification of Balaena rostrata Fabr. var. major. The beauty of this work is the elegant engraving by G. Eduard Müller in Berlin.

One of the smaller Baleen Whales, so-called for the plates they use to "filter feed", the Minke was first described by Fabricius in 1780 (hence the classification by Rosenthal), but is better known from Lacépède's 1804 description in his Histoire naturelle des cétacés. As the letterpress explains, this work was prompted by the stranding of the whale on the coast of the Baltic island of Rügen, a chance which gave natural historians a rare opportunity to study the animal in detail.

Rosenthal published this rare work as a festschrift for Dr Siegfried Joachim Meyer, the mayor of Greifswald. He also wrote a small monograph on the seal.