Philip S. Corbet 1962 A Biology of Dragonflies

Corbet's 'A Biology of Dragonflies', published by Witherby (1962) and Quadrangle (1963) and later reprinted by Classey (1983), is now long out of print and difficult to obtain. The book remains an important reference for workers on Odonata, providing a background that was not repeated in Corbet's 1999 book 'Dragonflies: behavior and ecology of Odonata' (Cornell UP, Harley Books).
This scan is from a copy of the 1962 Witherby edition.

By permission of the author this scanned reproduction is made available. As with the Tillyard project text and figures are available in .xif and .pdf format.
Although the aesthetics of the original are diminished the all important content is available. Internally text is compressed separately from figures. I find it easiest to read with magnification set at 125 or 150 (type this into the magnification box in the top bar of the viewer).

NOTE: There are some problems with the reproduction of some of the figures. I will rescan these pages later.

The book is available as a machine-searchable .pdf file here. The OCR of the text was completed automatically so the searchability is good, but not perfect.

This file is about 6.5Mb

To use the images in the Xerox/Omnipage .xif format

Please right-click (or other) and download the files for local reading, rather than messing about over a long link. The .pdf file is slightly coarser in my viewer but the pictures clean up if you use the zoom tool to expand them (this had me worried, but the information is there).

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