[Rarebooks] fa: HISTORY OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY 1667 - ROBERT HOOKE - WILLIAM PETTY etc.

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now - the last for awhile, you may be happy to note - auctions ending MONDAY, June 4. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/7lfjjmf

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Thomas Sprat: The History of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London: Printed by T. R. for J. Martyn at the Bell without Temple-bar, and J. Allestry at the Rose and Crown in Duck-lane, Printers to the Royal Society, MDCLXVII [1667]. FIRST EDITION (second state, with leaf P85 corrected). Small 4to (20.5 x 16cm) recently bound in half-leather and marbled boards, gilt-stamped spine labels; [14] + 438 + [2] pp. (pagination erratic, but text and signatures are continuous and complete); with the imprimatur, errata leaf, engraved coat of arms and two engraved plates, woodcut decorations and initials, in-text charts and tables. ESTC R16577; Wing S5032.

The first edition of the first history of the Royal Society — a somewhat presumptuous undertaking, one might think, considering how short a time the Society had been in existence. As ABRAHAM COWLEY remarks in the prefatory poem that opens the book, "To the Royal Society":
…Your cradle has not Idle bin:
None e're but Hercules and you could be
At five years Age worthy a History.
Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), chaplain to Charles II and later dean of Westminster, and an early member of the Society himself, explains in his "Advertisement to the Reader" that the first part of the work is a general history of Natural Philosophy (i.e. scientific inquiry) from ancient to modern times, and that the third part "chiefly contains a Defence… of Experimental Knowledge" from those critics who see it as a threat to the Church, the universities, and society as a whole. It's in the second, longest part of the work that Sprat deals most directly with the Royal Society itself, explaining its origins, its experimental method, and its purposes.

This section contains edited versions of papers by some of the Society's earliest leading lights, including its first Curator of Experiments, ROBERT HOOKE ("A Method for Making a History of the Weather", illustrated with a plate; "An Account of a Dog Dissected"), LAWRENCE  ROOKE (on eclipses of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter), VISCOUNT BROUNCKER ("Experiments of the Recoiling of Guns", illustrated with a plate); DR. JONATHAN GODDARD ("A Proposal for Making Wine"); as well as an account of the "Double-Bottom'd Ship invented by SIR WILLIAM PETTY; "Answers return'd by Sir Philiberto Vernatti, Resident in Batavia in Java Major, to certain Inquiries sent thither by Order of the Royal Society"; "A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe"; etc. There are also numerous references to other founding members of the Society, such as Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Thomas Henshaw, etc., etc. Of additional interest is Sprat's observations on the Great Plague and Fire of London (1665-66), coming as they do so soon after the events...