DUCHESNE (Antoine-Nicolas). Histoire naturelle des fraisiers, contenant Les vues d'Économie réunies à la Botanique; & suivie de Remarques particulières sur plusieurs points qui ont rapport à l'Histoire naturelle générale. Paris : Didot le jeune, C. J. Panckoucke, 1766. - In-12, 160 x 94: xij, 324, 118 pp, (1 f.), 1 plate. Marbled basane, cold fillet framing the boards, smooth spine decorated, red edges (period binding). A very rare first edition of the treatise by gardener-botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne (1747-1827). Considered to be the first work published in France entirely devoted to strawberry plants, this book confirms Duchesne as one of the most eminent specialists on this plant. It was "in Bernard de Jussieu, sub-demonstrator of the exterior of plants at the King's Garden in Paris and director of the royal garden of the Trianon in Versailles, [that] the young Duchesne had found a renowned teacher. Bernard de Jussieu enabled Duchesne to study the Trianon garden's extensive collection of some 4,000 specimens of native and exotic plants, and introduced him to his new plant classification. The young Duchesne studied not only the plants in the Trianon garden, but also those in his father's garden at Versailles and in the fields and forests around Paris. Thanks to this experience, Duchesne, then aged 17, was able to publish a Manuel de Botanique in 1764, most probably following the advice of Bernard de Jussieu (Duchesne 1764). [Only two years later, in 1766, Duchesne presented his Histoire Naturelle des Fraisiers to the Académie Royale des Sciences (Duchesne 1766). With this monograph on the genus Fragaria, as strawberry plants were known at the time, Duchesne not only reached the highest level in strawberry research and description, but also presented a celebrated scientific treatise that can be considered a classic of scientific botany. For the first time, he raised the question of the biological limits of different categories of taxonomic groups, and attempted to test them through experimental research. Duchesne put forward the thesis that plants that refuse to interbreed and produce sterile hybrids belong to different species. He thus tackled one of the fundamental problems of systematics. As such, he can be considered a precursor of modern biosystematics or experimental taxonomy. It was the German Solms-Laubach (1907) who called Histoire Naturelle des Fraisiers a botanical classic" (Günter Staudt, Les dessins d'Antoine Nicolas Duchesne pour son Histoire naturelle des fraisiers, Publications scientifiques du Muséum, 2003, p. 30). 30). The edition is illustrated with a copper-engraved plate giving the "Genealogy of strawberry plants". Good copy in contemporary binding. Skillful restoration to binding.