Maps 17.e.28

Imprint: London: Bell and Daldy, 186, Fleet Street. 1856.

Folio, quarter leather with brown buckram boards (British Museum binding), with coat of arms in gilt on upper and lower boards, measuring 440 x 335 mm; pp. 50; letterpress descriptions by J.R. Walbran and W. Jones and 23 photographic views, mounted on card one to a page, by Philip Henry Delamotte and Joseph Cundall, of Fountains Abbey, Easby Abbey, Rivaulx Abbey, Kirkstall Abbey and Bolton Priory.'...The antiquary, the geologist, the architect, and even the botanist, have each — in investigating the detail of their respective sciences, — felt, too often, that the artist has exercised his pencil on subjects of which he had not learned their 'language from the roots.' To the aid and rescue of these students, a latent power of nature has recently been evoked; and, in the present 'very shadows,' the sun has not only painted and engraved the rocks, the glens, and the streams that he saw, before one human eye gazed on their form or admired their beauty; but — together with his own ceaseless labours on the crumbling sculpture and the ivied wall, of which he watched the rise, the associations and the decay — has also recorded the more priceless traces of now nerveless hands and quenched intellects, with a fidelity that no pencil could attain or graver multiply...' (p. 2).