Fine Books & Manuscripts

DELAFIELD JR., John. An Inquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of Americas…with an Appendix Containing Notes and “A View of the Causes of the Superiority of the Men of the Northern Over those of the Southern Hemisphere.” New York: Colt Burgess & Co.; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman; and Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1839. Small folio (298 x 248 mm). Large folding lithograph frontispiece reproducing the Codex Boturini, printed on rice paper and tipped in on leaf facing title–page (1:1 ratio, 5791 mm in length), 10 lithograph plates (5 hand–colored). Original publisher’s gilt–stamped pictorial cloth, rebacked with leather spine gilt, all edges gilt, renewed endpapers (intermittent foxing including title–page). [Laid in with:] 8pp. publisher’s prospectus. Provenance: Benjamin Bussey (rubberstamp on title–page), prominent Boston merchant, farmer and horticulturist who donated his land to Harvard University for agricultural and horticultural advancement. The Arnold Arboretum currently resides there. FIRST EDITION, issue with New York imprint (no priority). Includes the study of the origins of the Native Americans, including those of South America. Delafield was particularly interested in the ancient tumuli left by the Mound Builders culture in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions, concluding that these had been built by ancient Egyptians “on the basis of evidence gleaned from Humboldt’s illustrations of monuments in South and Central America from ancient and modern skulls, and from the cranium of an Egyptian mummy” (Achim, p. 38). The sought-after frontispiece reproduces the legendary journey of the Aztecs from Aztlán to the Valley of Mexico. Includes the rare prospectus. Howes D–229 (“the folding plate is often lacking”); Sabin 19333; Field 509.