For biographical account of Anders Sparrman (1748-1820), a pupil of Linnaeus, see pp. 12-14. The work, written in Swedish, was translated into English by M. Leijer, the text figures were drawn by A. Hjelm.

The 18th century witnessed a new interest in African animals. Research was undertaken at the Cape of Good Hope by explorers whose books, manuscripts and drawings concerning mammals and birds are listed and discussed within this text.;This text gives details on four collections of 300 mammal and bird drawings connected with Levaillant's research. Many examples are illustrated. The zoological contents of the material left by these seven explorers are analyzed for all mammals and birds emphasizing the history, taxonomy, nomenclature and zoogeography.

“The great value of [this work] is the uniformly high quality of papers and their revelation of contemporary trends in Oceanic art research.” —Ethnoarts

“Tahiti is far famed yet too little known.” Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders’ way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence—a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo‘orea from about 1767 to 1815—a period labeled the Early European Era.

"This book presents a comprehensive and balanced description of major aspects of Polynesian cultures, using both the accounts of the European "discoverers" and the up-to-date writings of archaeologists and anthropologists".--BOOKJACKET.