Histoire Naturelle des Indes
94 of 122
Accession number: MA 3900
Credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983.
Title: Histoire Naturelle des Indes [supplied on an 18th century title page]
Contents: 199 images of West Indian plants, animals and human life, with accompanying manuscript captions written in late sixteenth-century French.
Medium: Most of the illustrations consist of a black chalk underdrawing and a combination of pen and brown ink with watercolor; on some images selected areas have also been glazed with a gum.
Dimensions: Binding: 30 x 21 cm; individual leaves: 29.3 x 19.7 cm.
Binding: Bound or rebound in brown leather in the late 18th century.
Pagination: Penciled folio numbers (1–125) in lower right corner of each page were added by The Morgan Library & Museum. Folios 92v–93, 93v–94, and 95v–96 are fold-out leaves.
Histoire Naturelle des Indes
La Maniere Comme Les Yndes Vont A La Chasse Pour Prendre Les Lappins (The Way the Indians Chase and Catch Rabbits)
They make an enclosure with a fence like a hurdle which they call in their language barbacone, cutting the grass where the rabbits come to rest, and looking from which side the wind blows, they make a fire there. The rabbits smelling it run and when they come to the end of said fence, the Indians are waiting for them there and kill them with their sticks.
Histoire Naturelle des Indes
Illustrated manuscript, ca. 1586
Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983; MA 3900 (fol. 95v–96)
