The Native Tribes of South Australia. Comprising The Narrinyeri, by the Rev. George Taplin; The Adelaide Tribe, by Dr. Wyatt, J.P.; The Encounter Bay Tribe, by the Rev. A. Meyer; The Port Lincoln Tribe, by the Rev. C.W. Schuermann; The Dieyerie Tribe, by S. Gason; Vocabulary of Woolner District Dialect (Northern Territory), by John Wm. Ogilvie Bennett; with an Introductory Chapter by J.D. Woods

Adelaide, E.S. Wigg & Son, 1879 [first thus]. Octavo, xliv, 316 pages. Original dark green cloth decorated in black on the front and rear boards, and decorated and lettered in gilt on the spine; cloth lightly flecked; a fine copy. An early collected reprint of works already scarce at the time of publication; the lengthy (34-page) introduction by Woods is new to this edition. This is a variant edition, as issued (we purchased several copies some years ago from the publisher's archive); it does not contain the eight tinted lithographs normally found in this collected reprint. These plates were new to the reprint. Not commonly known is that Taplin's substantial contribution, 'The Narrinyeri' (156 pages plus 6 preliminaries) is the text of the revised edition of 1878 (see his informative preface, dated 12 April 1878, at page [xliii]). The Wyatt contribution was not previously published as such; the text here was 'principally extracted from his official reports' stemming from his relatively short and unhappy time as the third South Australian Protector of the Aborigines, from 1837 to 1839 ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). The contributions by Meyer, Schuermann, Gason and Bennett first appeared in 1846, 1846, 1874 and 1869 respectively. Ferguson 13095 (noting variant bindings, but not noting this unillustrated edition).…