Condition Continued: There is a very old faded signature at the top of the inside front cover. There is no writing to be found anywhere else in the book. And there aren't any markings. And there aren't any attachments. This is NOT ex-library. There is a smidge of loss him at the inside middle edge of the first blank front end paper. There are just a handful of light spots on the first few pages and then after that I saw only two pages with a few tiny spots. The pages in this book are in excellent condition, exceptionally clean (I didn't see any soiling) and unworn. The book is straight and square. It is quite solidly bound. There are a small group of early pages that are not as tightly bound (they puff out a bit) at their inside middle as the rest of the pages in the book. However, even there, nothing is loose and there aren't any cracks or spaces. Other than that the pages are perfectly bound. 

G.P. Putnam & Co., New York, 1855. First Edition (SD). Quite rare (I saw only two or three others for sale).

Maximilian Schele de Vere was a professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia for more than fifty years. He wrote many books on philology as well as natural history. Stray Leaves was his first collection of essays on Nature and it includes discussions on geology, marine biology, animal migrations and animal communication. 

He was born in 1820, probably in Växjö, Sweden. Prussian province that later became part of Poland, where he learned the Slavic language. He spent part of his childhood in Silesia, a Prussian province that later became part of Poland, where he learned the Slavic language. He studied at the University of Bonn and at the University of Berlin, from which he received a doctorate in 1841. The University of Greifswald granted him a Doctor of Civil and Canon Law the following year. He moved to the United States in 1842. In 1844 he studied modern Greek at Harvard and joined the distinguished literary circle around Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and George Ticknor. With recommendations from Longfellow, other notable Bostonians, and the Prussian consul general in Baltimore, Schele De Vere accepted an invitation to become professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia. He initially taught Anglo-Saxon as the root of modern English, and French, German, Spanish, and Italian, along with the literature and political history of each nation. In 1849, he married Eliza Wydown Rives, the daughter of Alexander Rives, who served on the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and as a federal judge after the Civil War. She was also the niece of William Cabell Rives, who was twice minister to France and served in both the U.S. Congress and Confederate Congress. He supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, serving as captain of a home guard unit.