Beschreibung:

GEORGE BELLAS GREENOUGH (1778-1855)
GEORGE BELLAS GREENOUGH (1778-1855) A Geological Map of England and Wales . London: Geological Society, 1839 [but 1840]. Fine hand-coloured folding engraved map (engraved image 1882 x 1582mm), to the scale of 5 nautical miles to one inch, numbered 25 in ink manuscript under title imprint, dissected and laid down on linen into three sections, with separate engraved and hand-coloured index leaf, contained in a contemporary marbled paper portfolio, inside a modern paper portfolio. Provenance : Simon Schropp of Berlin (19th-century engraved mapseller's label on verso of northern section) -- John C. Thackray. A FINE, CLEAN COPY OF THE RARE SECOND EDITION . The map was sold to Fellows for £4 and to the public for £5. Greenough gave the copperplates to the Society on condition that once the Geological Society had recovered its expenses, any surplus from sales was to go to him, up to a total of £718 2s 5d which was the amount he had paid for drawing and engraving. After that, the plates were to be the property of the Society. It is now acknowledged that Greenough plagiarised William Smith's great map of 1815, but by the time the present work was published, Smith's work had been, to a large extent, recognised by the Geological Society. However, despite the Society's award of the Wollaston Medal in 1831, the government's honorific pension of £100 per annum, and the conferment of an honorary LL.D. from Trinity College, Dublin, on Smith, Greenough still refused to acknowledge his debt to Smith on the map itself; this only appeared on the third edition in 1869, long after Greenough's death. We would like to thank Tom Sharpe for his help in cataloguing this, and the previous, lot. Sold without the accompanying Memoir . Ward & Carozzi 953.