Reliquiae Afzelianae, sistentes icones fungorum, quos in Guinea collegit et in aere incisas excudi curavit Adamus Afzelius. Interpretatur E. Fries.

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Gott skick. Upsaliae [=Uppsala], Edquist & soc., 1860. Folio. [6] pp. text + 12 aquatint plates. Loose in recent custom made quarter morocco box. Some soiling, foxing and large repairs to text leaves, not affecting text, faint damp staining in outer margin of a few plates. Adam Afzelius (1750-1835) was one of the Apostles of Linnaeus. He was also a follower of Swedenborg, forming a part of the circles that counted Anders Sparrman, Carl Bernhard Wadström and August Nordenskiöld among their members. During the 1780s these Swedish abolitionist nourished a plan for a Swedenborgian colony for freed slaves on the west coast of Africa. When the colony of Sierra Leone was founded their found their ideas at least partly become true and Afzelius, together with August Nordenskiöld, traveled to Freetown for the Sierra Leone Company. As a true Linnean Apostle, Afzelius immideately started collecting zoological and botanical specimens to be brought back to Uppsala for study. His first collection was destroyed by the French bombardment of Sierra Leone in 1794, but Afzelius didn’t loose hope and returned for Sweden with a new collection and extensive notes in 1796. Even though he was appointed Professor of Botany at Uppsala in 1803 and lived a long life thereafter, he never succeeded in organizing his African collection into a comprehensive publication. The plates depicting the mycological findings were engraved already around 1810 but never published. Mycologist Elias Fries found them in the care of his son and published them with an accompanying text.