Formes des nuages dans l’Europe septentrional... [drophead title]. by WEILBACH,…

Large 4to (310 × 230 mm), pp. [1], 12-40, plus 4 colour printed plates with 16 images (printed by Hoffensberg & Traps in Copenhagen). Light browning to text. Contemporary mauve cloth, upper cover lettered in gilt. Portions of fading to the cloth, corners worn, but a very good copy. British armorial bookplate with the motto ‘Hinc Spes Effulget’ and contemporary ownership inscription ‘Francis Bruce’.

Danish artist and cloud classifier Philippe Weilbach was an amateur meteorologist who takes a significant part in the history of recording clouds and other atmospheric phenomena. Among other observations he was the first to describe and define the cumulonimbus cloud, published here in this memoir containing a history of cloud study (noting it began with Lamarck and the Englishman, Luke Howard) and his own observations from Copenhagen and elsewhere. It first appeared with only three plates in the Annuaire de l’Institut météorologique du Danemark and was reprinted with the fourth plate (with the image of the cumulonimbus cloud) in the Annales du Bureau central Météorologique de France for 1880 from which this a contemporaneously bound extract.

The author participated in the 1891 Munich meeting of the International Meteorological Committee, which culminated in the publication of the first International Cloud Atlas in 1896.