A handsome copy of this superb colour-plate bird book, whose beautifully visualised and coloured engravings include the earliest published illustration of an Australian bird, the famous depiction of the "Blue-headed and bellied Parrot" which travelled back to England on Cook's first voyage. The fifty full-page and handcoloured engravings are of outstanding quality.

A handsome copy of this superb colour-plate bird book, whose beautifully visualised and coloured engravings include the earliest published illustration of an Australian bird, the famous depiction of the "Blue-headed and bellied Parrot" which travelled back to England on Cook's first voyage. The fifty full-page and handcoloured engravings are of outstanding quality.

Brown's book - aimed for a wide audience, with texts in both English and French - illustrates and describes almost exclusively exotic species, from far afield. The New Zealand Creeper depicted by him must also derive from the Cook voyage (like the Lorikeet, it was drawn from a specimen in Tunstall's Museum). A number of the plates are of birds or mammals of Ceylon, India and the East Indies, while others come from South Africa, the Americas, even the Falkland Islands.

Brown was one of the leading zoological artists of his day, and closely associated with Thomas Pennant, Joseph Banks, and other leaders of the scientific/natural history community in late-eighteenth-century London. This closely-knit coterie included Marmaduke Tunstall, owner of a famous private museum that contained the bird which appears, engraved and handcoloured, as Plate VII in this work. The caption reads "November 3 1774 New South Wales, in New Holland; very numerous in Botany Bay. This bird was first brought over by Joseph Banks esq.". This Rainbow Lorikeet was the first live Australian bird to reach England.

Whittell quotes George Allan, the purchaser of the Tunstall collection: 'The Blue-headed and bellied Parrot… a native of New Holland [is] very numerous at Botany Bay. The bird was brought to England by Sir Joseph Banks who gave it to Mr Tunstall and informed him that it belonged to the unfortunate Tupia, a native of Otaheite, who died at Batavia, on his way to England. P. Brown in his Illustrations of Zoology has given a beautiful plate of the bird'. This well-travelled and quite splendid bird, which had belonged in turn to a Tahitian priest, Joseph Banks and then Marmaduke Tunstall, was the continuing source of much curiosity and study.