Item #118493 The Last of the Tasmanians. [Contained in] Report of the First Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Sydney ... in August and September 1888 [Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Sydney, 1887. Volume 1 (spine title)]. Truganini, William Lanne.

[Truganini and William Lanne]. AGNEW, Honourable James Willson

The Last of the Tasmanians. [Contained in] Report of the First Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Sydney ... in August and September 1888 [Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Sydney, 1887. Volume 1 (spine title)]

Sydney, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 1889.

Octavo, pages 478-481 plus 2 full-page plates (fine lithographic portraits of Truganini and Billy Lanny [sic], after photographs supplied by the author). The entire volume contains xxxvi, 660 (last blank), viii (index, last blank), xviii (list of members) pages plus a number of folding tables and at least 50 illustrations, maps and plates (many of them folding).

Cloth (lettered in gilt on the spine) very lightly worn at the extremities; new endpapers; a few of the folding plates, printed on slightly acidic paper, have split a little, or broken completely, along a fold or at the hinge (the only other copy of this volume we have handled had a similar problem, and we presume it is endemic); notwithstanding, an excellent copy.

Sir James Willson Agnew (1815-1901), medical practitioner and politician, arrived in Tasmania around 1840; he was an early member of the Tasmanian Society (later Royal Society), and 'in 1841 his first paper and in 1841 his first paper, "Notes on the teeth and poison apparatus of the snakes of Tasman's peninsula", was published in the second volume of the "Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science". In 1851 he was elected to the council of the Royal Society, and was its honorary secretary in 1861-81 and 1884-94. He became the first chairman of the board of management of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and an early chairman of the trustees of the Hobart Public Library; he retained both offices until 1901. His ethnological pamphlet, "Last of the Tasmanians", was published in Sydney in 1888' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). The 52-page anthropology section in this volume contains several long articles on aspects of life and language in Samoa, the New Hebrides, Malaya and Papua. There are numerous other articles of interest, including over 100 pages on geology; a few that catch the eye are PANTON, James: 'Some Supposed Further Traces of Leichhardt' (6 pages), STIRLING, James: 'The Physiography of the Australian Alps' (37 pages), and HORROCKS, J.J.: 'Modern Methods used for the Reproduction of Pictures' (7 pages).