Johann Gottlob von Kurr, The Mineral Kingdom, with Coloured Illustrations of the Most Important Minerals, Rocks, and Petrifications. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1859. Folio (35 x 24 cm): ix, [4], iii,[1], 70 pages, with 24 plates, 23 coloured, each preceded by a tissue guard with printed explanatory text. The main work is printed in two columns. In modern dark blue half card and marbled boards. A lovely copy. The coloured plates are very striking lithographs which are hand-coloured and finished using metallic finishes and iridescent colours to create a lustrous three-dimensional effect. To give additional impact, the plates are finished with gum Arabic. Johann Gottlob von Kurr (1798-1870) published Das Mineralreich in Bildern as a professor of mineralogy and botany at the Stuttgart Polytechnic Institute in 1858. This first edition English translation of the German text consists of two sections. ‘This finely illustrated volume is divided into two sections. The first is the introduction (pp. 1-11) which covers the forms of minerals and crystals, hardness, specific gravity, properties dependent on light and colour, electricity, magnetism, and heat, chemical relations and a table of chemical elements. The remainder of the text (pages 12-70) is devoted to special or descriptive mineralogy.... 'Here the various species and mineral groups are described. These include precious stones, hornblende or augite minerals, felspathic minerals, zeolithic minerals, micaceous minerals, calcareous minerals, compounds of baryta, compounds of strontia, salts of potash, salts of soda, salts of magnesia, salts of ammonia, combustible minerals, and metallic minerals or ores. The plates first prepared for the original German edition are reproduced here in new engravings and are used to illustrate the descriptive mineralogy’ C.P. Schuh, ‘Mineralogy and Crystallography, 2859, adding ‘very scarce’. A copy was sold by Rulon-Miller Books (St. Paul, MN), having been listed at €2,600.