London: Royal Society, 1888. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Galton’s invention of the statistical concept of correlation, one of the most “fundamental and ubiquitous” ideas in statistics (Stigler, p. 73). “Like all major scientific discoveries, correlation did not appear in a vacuum. It was a concluding..... More
Item #4698

Göttingen: Dieterich, 1823-1828. First edition, extremely rare separately-paginated offprints, of Gauss’s definitive presentation of the theory of least squares which “was the dominant theme – the leitmotif – of nineteenth-century mathematical statistics” (Stigler, p. 11). “Surveying problems motivated Gauss to develop his ideas on least squares and more general problems..... More
Item #5422

[Colophon:] Antwerp: G[regorius de] Bonte & Louvain: P[ierre] Phalèse, 1545. First edition, very rare, of Gemma Frisius’s remarkable astronomical treatise, the most significant early text on the astronomer’s cross-staff, with an early favourable discussion of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543), and the first printed illustration of the camera obscura – Tycho..... More
Item #4956

London: William du Gard for Laurence Sadler and Robert Beaumont, 1650. First edition, co-author’s copy, of the first full clinical description of rickets, then thought to have appeared only recently in England, and the first description of infantile scurvy. “In 1645 the Royal College of Physicians assigned to Glisson, Bate..... More
Item #5420

[Leyden]: in bibliopolio Commeliniano sumptibus viduae Joannis Comelini, 1620. First edition, extremely rare, of one of the earliest modern works on atomism. “Gorlaeus is counted among the founders of modern atomism, which he proposed as an alternative to Aristotelian matter theory. Because of his notion of atomic compounds, he is..... More
Item #4573

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter und Co., 1939 [1942, 1944]. First edition, offprint issues, of the three fundamental papers on nuclear fission which eventually lead to the creation of the atom bomb. “…experiments conducted in 1938 at Berlin by Hahn and Strassman [sic] were reported to Lise Meitner, an Austrian scientist..... More
Item #4152

London: Printed for W. and J. Innys & T. Woodward, 1727. First edition, and a particularly fine copy, of this important work on plant nutrition, experimental physiology, and pneumatic chemistry. “He studied the movement of sap in plants and discovered what is known now as root pressure. He measured the..... More
Item #5469

London: Printed by T. and J.W. Pasham, in Black-Friars, and sold by the booksellers, in London and Westminster, 1763. First edition, extremely rare, of Harrison’s announcement of his invention and testing of his first accurate chronometer, the famous ‘sea-watch’ later called H4, which solved the problem of determining longitude at..... More
Item #4994

London: Printed by Francis Leach, 1653. First edition in English of De motu cordis (1628), in which was described the discovery and proof of the circulation of the blood; this is the very rare first issue with uncancelled title and this leaf unclipped by the printer (see below). Harvey’s discovery..... More
Item #5638

[London: Macmillan, 1974]. First edition, extremely rare offprint issue, and Hawking’s own file copy, of his most important article, predicting that black holes emit radiation, now known as ‘Hawking radiation’. This would cause relatively low mass black holes (less than 1012 kg) to ‘evaporate’ completely in a time less than..... More
Item #5076

[N.p. N.p., 1943-44]. Historic autograph letter from Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), the inventor of quantum mechanics and author of the famous uncertainty principle, to his fellow physicist and sometime collaborator Hendrik Anthony Kramers (1894-1952), discussing Heisenberg’s S-matrix approach to elementary particle physics and urging Kramers to collaborate with him on a...... More
Item #5304

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1928. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Heisenberg’s solution of the problem of ferromagnetism, and a remarkable association copy linking two of the greatest figures in twentieth-century physics. Bohr and Heisenberg are also linked by the subject matter of the present work. In his..... More
Item #3526

Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1882-1883. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprints, of all three parts of one of the founding paper of chemical thermodynamics, along with Josiah Willard Gibbs’s 1876 paper ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances.’ In these papers, Helmholtz introduced the concept of ‘free energy’ and proved..... More
Item #5192