Geologische Beobachtungen auf den Reisen in den Gebirgsländern zwischen Kur und Araxes. [AND] La structure et la géologie du Daghestan.

Tiflis, Civil-Hauptverwaltung, 1867; St. Pétersbourg, Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, 1862. Two papers in one. 4to (30.0 x 22.9 cm). 163; 32 pp.; one large, folded tinted lithograph, two hand-coloured lithographed plates on one sheet, a few text engravings. Contemporary half cloth over marbled boards. Spine with hand-written label. = Important first geological study by "the father of Caucasian geology", the eminent German geologist Otto Wilhelm Hermann Abich (1806-1866) on the Caucasus (region of the rivers Kura and Aras). The second, smaller paper, has a fine plate with two hand-coloured views. It is a rare offprint from the Mémoires of the royal academy of science in Saint Petersburg, Volume 4(10). Especially the first monograph, printed in Tiflis [Tblisi], is extremely rare. It contains several illustrations and lengthy descriptions of mesozoic gastropods (in particular Nerinea), and brachiopods. First paper with, in the top margin of the title page, a dedication by the author to Kasimir Moesch in Zürich, i.e., the malacologist and palaeontologist Casimir Mösch (1827-1898), author of a monograph of fossil pholadomyids (bivalves). A few marginal spots, otherwise a very good copy. Cat. BM(NH) pp. 3 (second title), and 4 (first title); Not in Ward and Carozzi.