By Maria Graham.
Second edition, 1813.
15 plates, complete. Original publisher’s boards.
Hand-coloured copperplate engraved frontis.

Maria Graham, Lady Callcott (née Dundas; 19 July 1785 – 21 November 1842) was a British writer of travel books and children's books, and also an accomplished illustrator.

Later in 1822, she experienced the Valparaíso earthquake; one of the worst in Chile's history, and recorded its effects in detail. In her journal she recorded that after the earthquake "...the whole shore is more exposed and the rocks are about four feet higher out of the water than before." This idea that the land could be lifted proved controversial, but correct. An extract of Maria's letter to Henry Warburton giving an account of the earthquake was published in 1824 in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London. This was the first paper published in this journal by a woman.

In the mid-1830s her description of the earthquake in Chile of 1822 started a heated debate in the Geological Society, where she was caught in the middle of a fight between two rivalling schools of thought regarding earthquakes and their role in mountain building. Besides describing the earthquake in her Journal of a Residence in Chile, she had also written about it in more detail in a letter to Henry Warburton, who was one of the Geological Society's founding fathers. As this was one of the first detailed eyewitness accounts by "a learned person" of an earthquake, he found it interesting enough to publish in Transactions of the Geological Society of London in 1823.

One of her observations had been that of large areas of land rising from the sea, and in 1830 that observation was included in the groundbreaking work The Principles of Geology by the geologist Charles Lyell, as evidence in support of his theory that mountains were formed by volcanoes and earthquakes. Four years later the president of the Society, George Bellas Greenough, decided to attack Lyell's theories. But instead of attacking Lyell directly, he did it by publicly ridiculing Maria Callcott's observations.

Maria Callcott, however, was not someone who accepted ridicule. Her husband and her brother offered to duel Greenough, but she said, according to her nephew John Callcott Horsley, "Be quiet, both of you, I am quite capable of fighting my own battles, and intend to do it". She went on to publish a crushing reply to Greenough, and was shortly thereafter backed by none other than Charles Darwin, who had observed the same land rising during Chile's earthquake in 1835, aboard the Beagle.

R12,500