A geological taxonomy of Scottish plants. Rare.

[Scotland] / [Botany] / [Geology] / Boué, Ami. Dissertatio inauguralis de methodo floram regionis cujusdam conducendi, exemplis e flora scotica, &c. ductis, illustrata. Edinburgi: Excudebant Neill et Socii, 1817. 8vo in 4s [22.0 x 13.5 cm], [4] ff. (blank, half-title, title, dedication), 63 pp., [1] p. blank verso. In later wrappers, which are well preserved. Internally well preserved, top edge dusty, with only occasional minor edge toning and the occasional very minor stain.
 
 
Rare first and only edition of this treatise on the geographical distribution of plants in Scotland, the work of the prolific geologist Ami Boué (1794-1881), submitted as his graduate thesis in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. The peripatetic Boué studied with Robert Jameson (1774-1854) at Edinburgh and through his various expeditions gained a first-hand knowledge of the geography and geology of even the most forbidding regions of Scotland. In his Dissertatio inauguralis de methodo floram regionis cujusdam conducendi, Boué discusses the classic Linnaean classifications of Scottish plants and leans on the pioneering work of John Lightfoot (1735-88; e.g., his The Flora Scotica [1777]) and others, but he adds to this a novel manner of grouping flora by altitude (from the seashore, to bogs, heaths, woods, hills, mountains, etc.), by longitude and latitude (moving county by county though Scotland), and by geological features where various plants thrive.
 
Born in Hamburg, Boué studied there and in Geneva before studying medicine at Edinburgh from 1814 to 1817. Thereafter he settled in Paris. In his Essai géologique sur l’Écosse (1820),  he examined Scotland purely as a geologist. He was a founder of the Société Géologique de France in 1830 and was elected its president in 1835. In 1841 he settled in Vienna. Boué is remembered for his Mémoires géologiques et paléontologiques (1832), La Turquie d’Europe; observations sur la geographie, la géologie, l’histoire naturelle, etc. (1840). He was a correspondent of the Serbian Learned Society, and in 1849 he published the first ethnological map of the Balkan Peninsula.
 
OCLC locates U.S. examples of the Dissertatio inauguralis de methodo floram regionis cujusdam conducendi at Harvard Medical, National Library of Medicine, and Wisconsin.
 
*A. Rehder and C. S. Sargent, The Bradley Bibliography: Dendrology, p. 298; A Boué, Autobiographie du Docteur médécin Ami Boué (1879).