POTTER, Stephen & Laurens SARGENT. Pedigree, Essays on the Etymology of Words from Nature. London Collins. 1973

8vo.; original mid-green cloth lettered gilt to spine, in pictorial dustwrapper with wraparound design to spine; pp. [xvi], [17]-322, including index; a fine, almost as new, copy in unclipped as new jacket (£3.15) with offset-toning to half-title from a loose newspaper clipping but otherwise immaculate.

First edition of number 56 in the esteemed New Naturalist series.  

The writer Stephen Potter, who is best known for his amazingly successful  and witty handbooks “Lifemanship” and “One-Upmanship”, here takes on the intriguing and more scholarly task of investigating the names of things in the natural world and looking at words which have their origin in nature, “plants [are] named according to their characteristics; animals according to their movements, habits, physique and colour; and birds according to their songs, sex, scent and size”, in fact “the word ‘pedigree’ itself is from pied de grue – a crane’s foot, of which the three wide-spread toes suggest a genealogical ‘tree’”.