Voyages en différentes provinces de l'empire de Russie, et dans L'Asie septentrionale.

Paris: Maradan,, 1789-93. The celebrated French translation in the original boards First edition in French. First published in German, this is the account of Pallas's expedition across the central Russian provinces from 1768 to 1774. He reported on the passage of Venus, brought back numerous animal and plant specimens, and made anthropological observations of local peoples. Simon Peter Pallas (1741-1811) was a German zoologist and botanist and a leading figure in the Russian scientific enlightenment. He was educated at Halle, Göttingen, and at Leiden, where he submitted his doctorate in 1760. After a trip to England to study natural history and geology, Pallas settled at The Hague, where he published the acclaimed Elenchus zoophytorum and Miscellanea zoologica. He soon attracted the attention of Catherine the Great, who invited him to St Petersburg, where he became a professor of natural history at the Imperial Academy of Sciences. In 1768, at the specific request of the tsarina, he was placed in charge of an expedition of five naturalists and seven astronomers into Russia and Siberia. Over the next six years, the party traversed the empire from the plains of European Russia to the borders of Mongolia. "Pallas arrived back in St Petersburg in July 1774 with a vast amount of data and many fossil specimens but broken in health. His hair was whitened with fatigue, and nearly all of his companions had died. His journals had been regularly despatched back to St Petersburg and were awaiting him on his arrival" (Howgego). His chief geological contribution was the recognition of the temporal sequence of rocks from the centre to the flanks of a range. He also found a wide distribution of mammoth and rhinoceros fossils in the Siberian ice. This work was originally published in German in the period 1771-76. This French edition includes additional material covering the findings of the natural historians Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, Ivan Ivanovich Lepekhin, and Johann Gottlieb Georgi. Volume I is the second issue with the Maradan imprint and dated 1789. 6 vols comprising: 5 text vols, quarto (274 x 214 mm); folio with maps and plates (354 x 265 mm). With 97 engraved plates (26 folding), 10 engraved maps (3 folding, 2 double-page), large folding general area map (as called for) loosely inserted. Original dark pink paper covered boards, neatly rebacked to style with typographical labels, edges uncut. Boards a little rubbed and sunned, with minor neat repairs, soiled and softened at the corners, lightly browned throughout, also some occasional marginal damp staining, minor loss to front free endpaper in Vol. IV, preliminary leaves split at head in Vol. V, corners of front board of atlas heavily bumped. A very good, wide-margined copy. Atabey 900; Cohen-De Ricci, p. 781; Cross D11 (for first English edition); Howgego I, P10; Nissen, ZBI, 3076.