Jean-Jacques Rousseau's copy of Albrecht von Haller's Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoata (1768)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau sold his botanical texts to Daniel Malthus (father of Thomas Malthus) about 1775. Two of these are now in the Old Library, Jesus College, Cambridge, but all the rest have long been thought lost. However, a copy of Albrecht von Haller's Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoata (1768) in The Lindley Library, Royal Horticultural Society, London, bears Rousseau's name and seems to have been annotated by him. The volume contains the bookplate of Jane Dalton, a cousin to whom Malthus willed “all [his] Botanical Books in which the Name of Rousseau is written”. Haller was well-known to Rousseau, who, while in exile in the Swiss Jura (1763–1765), studied under one of Haller's collaborators, Abraham Gagnebin. Rousseau cited Haller's entry 762 when describing a species of Seseli to the Duchess of Portland.