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, Hilbert’s last publication in physics, and von Neumann’s first publication on the subject that was to occupy the remainder of his scientific life..... More
Item #6686
London: John Murray, 1874. First edition, first issue of the book in which Darwin finally gave his public account of two ideas he had withheld from the Origin of Species: the descent of Homo sapiens from pre-existing forms, and — his more original and more contested contribution — the mechanism..... More
Item #6679
Paris: Guillaumin et Cie; Victor Masson et Fils, 1862. First edition in French of Darwin’s Origin, translated with his authorisation from the third English edition of 1861, and the most disputed of its early translations — rendered, prefaced, footnoted, retitled, and intellectually re-framed by Clémence Royer, the self-taught philosopher, economist..... More
Item #6677
Cantabrigiae [Cambridge: Cornelius Crownfield at the University Press], 1713. Second edition, and the first to contain the General Scholium — Newton’s most famous and most quoted single passage, in which the phrase Hypotheses non fingo appears in print for the first time. Twenty-six years separate this edition from the 1687..... More
Item #6668
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 to the human races, and the work in which, across fifty-five years and four political..... More
Item #6665
Rome: Stamperia di Angelo Rotili [sold by Bouchard e Gravier], 1756. First edition, a remarkably tall, large-paper copy, of the foundational treatise on Roman engineering — Dibner’s Heralds of Science 169 — and the book that established archaeology as an empirical, measured, and visually documentary science. Across four folio volumes..... More
Item #6663
London: 1738. Written in the closing weeks of one of the most consequential empirical episodes in eighteenth-century natural philosophy, the letter brings the Lapland expedition’s data to the leading British exponent of Newton’s theory of the figure of the Earth at the moment they first reached London, and urges him..... More
Item #6657
Basel & London: 1729–1733. A four-document mathematical dossier, descended in the Stirling family at Garden, Stirlingshire, from the eighteenth century down to the present generation. It preserves, in a single file, the full three-way exchange between Bernoulli in Basel, James Stirling in London, and John Machin in London from December..... More
Item #6656
[Padua: 1719]. The earliest item of Stirling’s scientific correspondence recorded in private hands, and one of the earliest of his mathematical manuscripts known to survive anywhere: Bernoulli’s letter from Padua, written on 29 April 1719 to Stirling at Venice, and preserved undisturbed at the Stirling family seat of Garden, in..... More
Item #6655
Göttingen: E. A. Huth, 1851. First edition, extremely rare, of Riemann’s doctoral dissertation, ranked by Laugwitz among the most important achievements of nineteenth-century mathematics — an association copy bearing the stamp of the Göttingen Royal Observatory, of which Gauss had been director from 1807 until his death in 1855. The..... More
Item #6639
Cambridge: at the University Press, 1910-12-13. First edition of all three volumes, and an association set: Volume I carries the ownership signature of Karl Schmidt (1874–1961), the German-trained philosopher-mathematician who supervised Norbert Wiener’s 1913 Harvard doctoral dissertation comparing the algebra of relatives in Schröder with that in Whitehead and Russell..... More
Item #6628
Paris: Pierre Gaultier, 1544. First edition of 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). It is the earliest Latin version of the Greek surgical corpus of Hippocrates, Galen, and Oribasius, translated from the..... More
Item #6623
Paris; Tubingen: Sébastien Cramoisy; Typis Theodorici Werlini; impensis Philiberti Brunni, 1632; 1632. First edition, very rare, of Gassendi’s work containing the description of the first observation of the transit of Mercury across the Sun. It was addressed to Wilhelm Schickard, a professor of astronomy at Tübingen, and we include the..... More
Item #6619
Berlin: A. Förstner, 1851. First edition, an exceptionally fine copy in original printed wrappers, of this famous work which describes Helmholtz’s announcement of his invention of the ophthalmoscope, one of the most important clinical tools in medicine, which greatly improved the ability of ophthalmologists to diagnose eye disease and revolutionized..... More
Item #6616
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
London: J. Tonson, J. Osborn & T. Longman, 1728. First edition of Newton’s rarest book — the discarded first draft of what would become Book III of Principia, posthumously published in the year following his death — and an extraordinary association copy, inscribed by James Stirling: “Ja: Stirling Ex Dono..... More
Item #6610
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
Basel: Frederick Lüdi, [1719]. First edition, extremely rare, and a presentation copy from Nicolaus I Bernoulli to James Stirling, of this dissertation which describes Johann I Bernoulli’s two decades of work on ‘barometric light’ – the discovery of this phenomenon revealed the possibility of electric lighting. One of the foremost..... More
Item #6608
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
Venice: Remondini, 1761. First edition, first issue, an exceptional copy, completely untouched in the original printer’s interim-boards, of “one of the most important [works] in the history of medicine” (Garrison & Morton). “After Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502), Giovanni Battista Morgagni is considered the founder of pathological anatomy. His ‘De sedibus’, regarded..... More
Item #6603
London: 1896–1915. A substantial autograph archive — 102 items, more than 350 manuscript pages, almost all in Lady Huggins’s own upright hand — chronicling across nearly twenty years the private scientific and artistic life of one of the most accomplished women in Victorian and Edwardian British astronomy, and a co-worker..... More
Item #6601
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
Paris: Simon de Colines, 1545. First edition, a large-paper copy — with every one of its pinholes preserved along the fore-edge, from the library of Haskell F. Norman — of “one of the finest woodcut books of the French Renaissance” (Schreiber) and “the most magnificent anatomical atlas of the sixteenth..... More
Item #6596
Berlin: Springer, 1935-1939. First edition, journal issues in original printed wrappers, including the true first appearance of Hahn and Strassmann’s discovery of nuclear fission, as well as the work of Hahn and Meitner which led up to the discovery, and the subsequent work of Hahn and Strassmann on the identification..... More
Item #6595