Cimelia physica is a collection of 60 natural history illustrations by John Frederick Miller with descriptive text by George Shaw. Published in 1796 by the great natural history publishers of the late eighteenth century, Benjamin and John White, the book was a retitled second edition of Miller’s 1776-85 work Icones Animalium et Plantarum. The original work (see RCIN 1083499), issued in 10 parts of 6 plates each, was accompanied only by sheets containing Miller's binomial names based on the Linnaean system, so Shaw’s descriptions were entirely new. While many of Miller’s names for species were kept, several others were changed by Shaw. This led to confusion in the early twentieth century as naturalists sought to discover who had first named certain species. An article in the ornithological journal The Ibis (C. Davies Sherburn & Tom Iredale, ‘J. F. Miller’s Icones’, The Ibis, series 11 vol. 3, pp. 302–30) noted the discovery of an almost complete copy of Icones (now in the Natural History Museum), which led to the restoration of Miller’s binomials for several bird species. These include the king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), crested caracara (Caracara plancus), secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), lesser florican (Sypheotides indica) and the green wood-hoopoe (Phoeniculus purpureus).
Comparison between the plates of Icones and those in Cimelia physica shows that many were re-etched to incorporate missing elements, from signatures and plate numbers to names of species, while others may have been resued from unsold stock. This might explain the rarity of existing copies of Icones Animalium. However, the colouring of the plates in Cimelia was often different to that found in Miller’s original, particularly in the first half. There is evidence that some of these plates were overpainted, perhaps to match specimens that had faded in the intervening period.