Familiar Lessons on Mineralogy and Geology: with colored plates. To which is added a practical description of the use of the lapidary's apparatus, explaining the methods of slitting and polishing pebbles, & c. … Seventh edition.

London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1825.. 12°, nineteenth-century marbled boards recently rebacked with crimson Oasis morocco and refurbished with new corners, smooth spine, gilt letter. Some light dampstaining at front and to inner margin, scattered stains, some offsetting from the plates. Inner margins of frontispiece and title page reinforced with clear tape, extending .5 cm. into the frontispiece image. Overall good to very good. Old signature at top of title page. Davis & Orioli invoice to J. de Sousa-Leão (see below) dated 25 October 1944 tipped to front endleaves. vi pp., (1 l.), 110 pp., (1 blank l.), 4 hand–colored engraved plates (including the frontispiece). *** Seventh edition of a popular handbook first published London, 1819. The upper half of the frontispiece depicts "A Brazilian miner [with his black assistant] washing the alluvial soil (raked from the rivulet) for gold & diamonds." On pages 97-8 Mawe provides a long commentary on the frontispiece and a first-hand account of how Brazilians pan for gold and diamonds in Cerro do Frio, "which the Author visited by royal permission." Mawe claims to have "seen eight men procure upwards of twenty ounces of Gold in four hours, from a portion of soil not above two tuns in weight …."Mawe (d. 1829), who spent many of his early years at sea, collected minerals in England for the King of Spain in the late eighteenth century. When war broke out between England and Spain in 1804, he was detained at Cadiz and then again at Montevideo. Only after Beresford captured Montevideo was he released. Soon after, he began his journey to Rio de Janeiro and then into Minas Geraes, which lasted two and a half years. After his return to England in 1811, he published Travels in the Interior of Brazil, particularly in the Gold and Diamond Districts of that Country, by Authority of the Prince Regent of Portugal, including a Voyage to the Rio de la Plata, and an Historical Sketch of the Revolution of Buenos Ayres (1812), opened a shop in the Strand and wrote books on mineralogy.Provenance: Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, distinguished Brazilian historian and diplomat of Portuguese ancestry, was a significant book and art collector. He wrote on art and historical subjects, being an expert on the Flemish painter Frans Post: see Frans Post 1612-1680, Amsterdam: A.L. Gendt & Co., 1973, and Frans Post, São Paulo: Civilização Brasileira, 1948.*** Cf. Borba de Moraes (1983) II, 543: citing the tenth edition, London 1828, also containing the plate of the Brazilian miner. NUC: OkU, CtY.