Tillyard's 'The Biology of Dragonflies (Odonata or Paraneuroptera)'
published by Cambridge University Press, while long out of print and almost
unobtainable still remains an essential reference for workers on Odonata. In
this project the text and figures are made available. There is both a facsimile of the text and figures in .xif format (an efficient
high compression format) and a machine-searchable .pdf version generated from the .xif files. Although the aesthetics of the original are diminished
the all important content is available. Figures were recorded at 300dpi so they easily
withstand examination at 200% magnification (see example at the bottom of this
page). I find it easiest to read the material with magnification set at 125 or 150 (type
this into the magnification box in the top bar of the viewer).
Because of the font used for the book the text compression has difficulties
with 'c' and 'e'. Scanning at sufficient resolution to minimise this problem
would produce files about twice the size ... I left it.
While 90 years have passed since this magnum opus was prepared it has lost little in that time. An important aspect of the work is that it contained so much new material, some of which never was formally written up for detailed presentation.
The late Tony Watson and I had hoped to have a facsimile edition of this book printed to celebrate Australia's great, adopted student of Odonata and first Chief of the CSIRO Entomology Division. However, it is now more appropriate to make the document widely available through the www.
It is the intention to reproduce the book as time allows, and to provide commentaries on chapters with modern literature entries to bring the information up to date.
Other Tillyard works (e.g. the caudal lamellae papers) will also be prepared and placed on the web as time permits.
This project received the blessing of Tillyard's daughter 'Duchy' (Faith Evans) and of his grandson Jeremy Evans.
Missing from this copy: frontispiece, colour in some of the wing venation
figure labels (pl II facing p44) (available here
frontispiece1.jpg,
till_plII.xif,
till_plII.jpg),
the colour plate (pl III) at the beginning of Ch XIII is grey scale (colour here
till_plIII.xif,
till_plIII.jpg),
the fold out flimsy in Ch XV wasn't processed originally - too awkward and information of
lesser interest (available here
flimsy.xif).
There is a problem with some of the marginal annotations in this copy as it is
almost certain it was at one stage in Tillyard's possession, consequently some
of the annotations may have been his; others are obviously the work of
undergrad students. I have left in some confidently inked annotations in an
older script.
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.
To use the images in the Xerox/Omnipage .xif format
The image-only .pdf files have also been withdrawn.
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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