Bell: Monograph of the Testudinata
Thomas Bell’s A Monograph of the Testudinata is one of the great reptile books, containing the finest series of colored plates of turtles ever published. A dental surgeon and professor of zoology, Bell was also a leading English naturalist when he began his ambitious attempt to summarize all the world�s turtles, living and extinct. Working with Bell to produce the forty plates was natural history artist James de Carle Sowerby, to whom Bell would send live specimens. But the genius of the published plates is largely attributable to Edward Lear (known to generations for his nonsense verse), whose reputation as the finest natural history lithographer of his age had earlier been established by a monumental folio on parrots.
[I had not realised so far that the book can be read online and the illustrations are quite good: buying the CD-ROM is still better, however]
Octavo Edition