London: Macmillan, 1953. First edition, rare, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of the four papers by which the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid was announced to the world and its implications for heredity set out. The 25 April 1953 issue of Nature carries, under the common head-title ‘Molecular..... More
Item #6690

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1928. First edition, very rare offprint, of the paper that is at once the first published attempt at an axiomatic foundation of quantum mechanics, David Hilbert’s last publication in physics, and John von Neumann’s first publication on the subject that was to occupy the remainder of his..... More
Item #6686

Paris: Guillaumin et Cie; Victor Masson et Fils, 1862. First edition in French of the single most important biological work ever written, and the most disputed of its early translations — rendered, prefaced, footnoted, retitled, and intellectually re-framed by Clémence-Auguste Royer, the self-taught philosopher, economist, and feminist whom Darwin, reading..... More
Item #6677

Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale [later Imprimerie des Bâtimens du Roi; Hôtel de Thou; Plassan], 1749–An XII [1804]. First edition of the first work to present natural history as a continuous secular narrative—from planetary formation through geology and mineralogy to the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and cetaceans, and at last to the..... More
Item #6665

London: 1738. An autograph letter signed by John Machin (c. 1686–1751), Secretary of the Royal Society and Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, four pages on a bifolium, written from Gresham College on 22 June 1738 to the Scottish mathematician James Stirling at Leadhills — descended in the Stirling family..... More
Item #6657

[Padua: 1719]. An autograph letter signed by Nikolaus I Bernoulli (1687–1759), in Latin, written from Padua on 29 April 1719 to the Scottish mathematician James Stirling, then in Venice — preserved undisturbed at the Stirling family seat of Garden House in Stirlingshire from the eighteenth century until 2025, the earliest..... More
Item #6655

Paris: Pierre Gaultier, 30 April 1544. First edition, in entirely untouched contemporary limp vellum, of the most beautiful surgical book of the Renaissance and one of the three great illustrated medical books of the mid-sixteenth century, with Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) and Estienne’s De dissectione (1545). The volume..... More
Item #6623

St. Petersburg: I. N. Kushnereff & Ko. 1897. First edition of Pavlov’s landmark lectures on the work of the principal digestive glands, the classic statement of the experimental physiology of digestion for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. In these lectures Pavlov presents the..... More
Item #6618

Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1733. First edition, presentation copy to James Stirling, of this important milestone in the emergence of geophysics, in which Mairan put forwardthe first rational and scientific (for the time) explanation of the aurora borealis: he proposed that the Northern Lights are caused by the Sun, as the..... More
Item #6611

Lyon: Christophe Fourni, 1665. First edition, rare, of Fabri’s work on the Copernican theory, followed by a theory of tidal action based on the influence of the moon, a theory of capillarity based on the idea that air could not enter capillaries as easily as liquids, and a more detailed..... More
Item #6609

Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1738. First edition, a highly important presentation copy from the author to James Stirling, of this influential work detailing the 1736 expedition to Lapland to prove Isaac Newton’s theory that Earth is flattened at the poles, not elongated as the Cassini family suggested, confirming a pear-shaped (oblate..... More
Item #6606

Ulm: Typis & impensis Balthasari Kühnen, Reipubl. Ulmenf., Typographi & Bibliopolæ, 1655. First edition, and a fine unsophisticated copy, of the most popular and influential surgical text of the seventeenth century: a comprehensive illustrated “armamentarium” of operative surgery, issued with 43 large folio copper-engraved plates by the Ulm artist Jonas..... More
Item #6604

Leiden: Elzevir, 1657. First edition of Huygens' De ratiociniis in aleae ludo, the first printed treatise on probability. “Having heard in Paris about Pascal’s work in probability problems, Huygens (1629-95) himself took up their study in 1656. This resulted in the Tractatus de ratiociniis …, a treatise that remained the..... More
Item #6599