Traité de la lumière. Ou sont expliquées les causes de ce qui luy arrive dans la reflexion, & dans le refraction, et particulièrement dans l’étrange refraction du cristal d’Islande. Avec un Discours de la cause de la pesanteur.
Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1690. First edition, first issue, and an extremely rare large-paper presentation copy inscribed by Huygens to Pierre-Daniel Huet, of the classical formulation of the wave theory of light and one of the foundational books of modern physics. Huygens had developed his theory in 1676 and 1677 and completed the manuscript in 1678, but left it unpublished for twelve years. The delay was broken at last by the appearance of Newton’s Principia in 1687 and by his own visit to Newton during his third English journey in 1689. The volume also contains Huygens’s treatise on gravity, first read to the Paris Academy in 1669 and here published for the first time. The present copy is inscribed in Huygens’s hand on the title-page to ‘Monsieur L’Evesque de Soissons’. The presentation dates necessarily to the brief window between the book’s publication in 1690 and Huet’s 1692 translation to the see of Avranches, when he ceased to bear the title by which Huygens here addresses him. Provenance: Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), bishop of Soissons, to whom Huygens gave the copy, with Huygens’s autograph inscription on the title ‘Pour Monsieur L’Evesque de Soissons’ (the hand conforms to other examples of his presentation hand and has been confirmed by the curator of the Huygens archive), Huet’s book-label on the front pastedown, and matching gilt medallions of Huet showing a bishop’s mitre on both boards; the Jesuits, to whom Huet bequeathed his library; bought in 1764 by King Louis XV of France on the dissolution of the Jesuit order; presumably dispersed during the French Revolution; Charles Fournerat (1780–1867), French politician, with his autograph ‘Ex libris Caroli Fournerat’ on the title and a full page of notes on the book in his hand on the recto of the front free endpaper, the copy appearing as no. 335 in the Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de feu M. Fournerat, Ancien Député de Nantes et Ancien Magistrat, Libraire Bachelin-Deflorenne, Paris, 1868, the sale running eight days from 22 October; Prosper-René Blondlot (1849–1930), French physicist at the University of Nancy, who acquired it at that sale or thereafter (invoice of the Berlin antiquarian book dealer Mayer & Müller, 1904). Blondlot made the first terrestrial measurement of the speed of radio waves in 1891, but is remembered today chiefly for his subsequent claim of the so-called ‘N-rays’, the N standing for Nancy, a phenomenon shortly demonstrated to be illusory and serving ever since as the cautionary tale in the scientific literature of how easy it is to deceive oneself into seeing something that is not there. Huet was a late seventeenth-century anti-Cartesian — his Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ (1689), Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme (1692), and posthumous Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723) systematically attacked the foundations of Cartesianism and argued the fallibility of human reason, including an explicit challenge to the ‘Cogito ergo sum’ and to the Cartesian test of clear and distinct ideas as a criterion of truth. Leibniz described him as the most learned man of his age. Huet and Huygens had been friends and correspondents for decades by the time of the present presentation; the friendship had begun in 1659, when Huygens presented to Huet a copy of his Systema Saturnium, the work announcing the first satellite of Saturn and the true nature of Saturn’s ring. Huet (1630–1721) was born at Caen on 8 February 1630 and died in Paris on 26 January 1721. He was educated at the Jesuit college of Caen and also received private instruction from the Protestant pastor and Orientalist Samuel Bochart. By the age of twenty he was reckoned among the most promising scholars of his time. In 1651 he went to Paris and formed a friendship with the librarian of the Mazarin Collection, Gabriel Naudé; in 1652 he accompanied Bochart to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden at Stockholm, and in the royal library there discovered fragments of Origen’s commentary on St Matthew, which became the point of departure for his own later edition of Origen. In 1662 he founded with André Graindorge the Académie de Physique at Caen, which was granted a royal charter in 1668 and became the first provincial academy of science in France; he served as its head from 1662 to 1672. From 1670 he assisted Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in the education of the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, and in this capacity directed the preparation of the Delphin Classics — the celebrated Ad usum Delphini edition of the Latin classics in some sixty volumes. Huet was elected to the Académie française in 1674. He took holy orders in 1676; was named to the see of Soissons in 1685, but delays owing to the Gallicanism dispute between France and the Holy See prevented him from receiving his papal bulls until 1692, by which time he had exchanged Soissons for the see of Avranches. He held Avranches from 1692 to 1699, retiring thereafter to the abbey of Fontenay-sous-Caen, and at last to the Jesuit house in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris, to which he bequeathed his celebrated library. Huygens conceived light as an irregular series of shock waves or pulses proceeding with very great but finite velocity through an ether consisting of uniformly minute elastic particles pressed closely together. Using this ether as the medium of propagation, he showed that all points of a wave front originate partial waves, and thereby generate further wave motion: light is not a transference of matter but a ‘tendency to move’, a serial displacement similar to the collision that proceeds through a row of balls. Because the particles of the ether lie not in rows but irregularly, a colliding particle will transfer its tendency to move to all those it touches in the direction of its motion, so that new wave-fronts originate around each particle and extend outwards from it in the form of hemispheres. Single wave-fronts originating at single points are infinitely feeble; but where infinitely many of these fronts overlap, there is light — on the envelope of the wave-fronts of the individual particles. This is Huygens’s principle. Huygens’s principle, so stated, allowed him to explain reflection and refraction by connecting the index of refraction with the velocities of light in different media. He became completely convinced of the value of the principle on 6 August 1677, when he found the explanation of the double refraction in Iceland spar by means of his wave theory. He referred to this explanation as his experimentum crucis, and historically it was: the concept of particular waves could be confirmed only in double refraction, for all the other phenomena he treated could be explained otherwise. Everyone who accepted Huygens’s principle did so because of the Iceland-spar result, and even Newton, who rejected the wave theory, knew that he would have to launch a direct attack on double refraction. The limit of Huygens’s success was polarization, which he himself had discovered in the course of the Iceland-spar investigations — the effect that appears when a refracted ray is directed through a second crystal of varying orientation — but which he could never explain. The entire theory, as Alan Shapiro has shown, is devoted to the description of the motion of a pulse through elastic media. Because such a kinematic approach would be scarcely conceivable without a finite speed of propagation, Huygens opens the Traité by presenting Rømer’s observations establishing the finite speed of light — Rømer having announced this result in 1676, using the eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter — and by rejecting Descartes’s view that the speed of light is infinite, a view Huygens describes as incomprehensible. He then constructs what appears to be a conventional billiard-ball model of the ether, but the model gradually vanishes as the argument proceeds, and only the kinematic requirements remain. Drawing on his earlier investigations of impact — the laws of collision of perfectly elastic bodies — he sets a single condition on the ether sufficient for it to serve for the propagation of light: that it consist of elastic particles. From this alone he is able to show that the velocity of light will be finite and uniform, independent of the strength of the source, and that the principle of superposition will hold, since in collisions of elastic bodies the same particles of matter can serve for many waves coming from different directions. Huygens’s principle, as stated in the Traité, consists of three propositions: that each point of the wave front is the centre of particular waves; that the wave front is determined by the common tangent to the extremities of these wavelets; and that the particular waves are perceptible only at their common tangent. This is kinematically equivalent to the modern definition of a wave-front as the locus of points reached by a disturbance in a given time, and the construction is the culmination of the seventeenth-century attempts — beginning with Hobbes and proceeding through Hooke, Pardies, and Ango — to describe the motion of a pulse or wave through optical media. In the remainder of the work Huygens applies the principle to phenomena of increasing complexity. He first treats the elementary problems of reflection and refraction of plane waves at plane surfaces, and then refraction in inhomogeneous media such as the atmosphere. In the final two chapters he rises to the level of sophisticated mathematical physics, solving elegantly the problem of the relation of the wave theory to geometrical optics by means of the mathematics of evolutes and involutes — the same mathematical apparatus at the heart of the Horologium oscillatorium — and relating the solution to the caustic. To explain the two refractions of Iceland crystal — one obeying the ordinary law of Snell, the other behaving in a completely extraordinary way — Huygens assumed that two sets of particular waves were generated: the usual spherical waves, carried by ordinary ether and producing the normal refraction, and spheroidal waves, carried by a second medium whose velocity of propagation depended on direction so that the wave expanded not as a sphere but as an ellipsoid of revolution. By studying the symmetry of the crystal he determined the orientation of the ellipsoids, and from the refraction properties of the abnormal ray he established the proportion between the axes. He calculated the refraction of rays on plane sections of the crystal other than the natural crystal sides, and verified many of his predictions experimentally — including one prediction of a previously unknown phenomenon. These results were at the forefront of contemporary mathematical physics, and it would take Stéphane Malus and others more than a century to reconstruct Huygens’s ideas of rays and wavefronts. One key to Huygens’s success, Shapiro observes, was the limited range of phenomena he attempted to explain. He did not treat diffraction, interference, colour, or even polarization, which he had discovered. He was able to overcome the rampant conjectural aspect of Cartesian natural philosophy while remaining loyal to the mechanical philosophy by basing his theory on general hypotheses that were mathematically and experimentally tractable, and independent of the invisible structure of matter. The Traité was published in French rather than in the Latin of most of Huygens’s other works because, Shapiro suggests, he regarded it as an incomplete or imperfect work precisely in its silence on polarization; this may also be why his full name does not appear on the title of the first issue. Newton would adopt the same strategy in his Opticks of 1704, which likewise appeared in the vernacular and did not bear the author’s name — a tacit homage, perhaps, to the model Huygens had set. The second part of the volume, the Discours de la cause de la pesanteur, takes up Huygens’s vortex theory of gravity, a purely mechanistic account that stands in sharp contrast to Newton’s theory of a universal attracting force intrinsic to matter. The explanation develops ideas that Huygens had taken from Descartes: he presupposes a vortex of particles of subtle matter circling the earth at great velocity, so that by virtue of their circular motion these particles have a tendency — a conatus — to move away from the centre. They can follow this tendency if ordinary bodies in the vortex move inward towards the centre; and thus the centrifugal tendency of the vortex particles causes, by displacement, the centripetal tendency in ordinary bodies that we call gravity. The space that a heavy body vacates under the influence of gravity can be taken by an equal quantity of subtle matter, so that the weight of a body equals the centrifugal conatus of an equal quantity of subtle matter moving very rapidly around the earth. This argument led Huygens to his investigations of centrifugal force in 1659, and his demonstration there of the similarity between the centrifugal and gravitational conatus strengthened his conviction of the validity of the vortex theory. The 1659 study also enabled him to work out the theory quantitatively: given the radius of the earth and the acceleration of gravity, he could calculate the velocity of the subtle-matter particles and found that they must circle the earth about seventeen times in twenty-four hours. He developed this further in the treatise he presented to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1669. The cylindrically symmetrical vortices posited by Descartes could explain only gravity directed towards an axis, so Huygens imagined a multilaterally moving vortex — in which the particles circle the earth in all directions — by which a truly centrally directed gravity could be explained. The particles are forced into circular paths because the vortex is held within a sphere enveloping the earth, bounded by other bodies such that the particles cannot leave this space. The boundary of the gravitational vortex was initially set between the earth and the moon, because Huygens believed the moon to be carried around the earth by a uniaxial vortex of its own, the vortex deferens. Convinced by Newton of the impossibility of these deferent vortices, Huygens later supposed the gravity vortex to extend beyond the moon. Galileo’s law of falling bodies, which requires that the acceleration acquired by a falling body in a unit of time be independent of the body’s velocity, is the greatest obstacle to any mechanistic explanation of gravity, since the acceleration in such an explanation must be acquired during collisions, and changes of velocity in colliding bodies are dependent on their relative velocities. Huygens argued that because the velocity of the vortex particles is very great relative to the velocity of the falling body, the relative velocity may be treated as approximately constant, so that Galileo’s law holds approximately for small velocities of fall. The fundamental question raised by this account of gravity — how, through collisions, a centrifugal tendency of the subtle-matter particles can transfer a centripetal tendency to heavy bodies — Huygens never discussed. In the Discours the 1669 treatise is reiterated almost verbatim, but he has appended a review of Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which caused him to revise his own views in certain respects. He resolutely rejected Newton’s notion of a universal attraction, because he believed it obvious that the cause of such an attraction could not be explained by any mechanical principle or law of motion. But he accepted Newton’s demonstration of the impossibility of the vortices deferentes, and he accepted his explanation of the motion of satellites and planets by a force varying inversely with the square of the distance from the central body. For Huygens, even this inverse-square gravity was itself to be explained by a vortex, though he did not dwell on the mechanism by which such a vortex would yield the inverse-square dependence. The Traité de la lumière was issued in two states of the two title-leaves. One bears on both titles the author’s initials ‘C. H. D. Z.’ — Christian Huygens der Zeelhem — and is identified by Norman as the probable first issue; the other carries Huygens’s name in full. Most of the large-paper presentation copies, including the present one as well as those of Horblit, Norman, Newton, and Locke, are in the first state. Only three large-paper presentation copies of the first issue are recorded at auction in the past generation: Christie’s New York, 9 June 1999, $74,000 (Honeyman); Christie’s New York, 10 December 1999, $101,500; Sotheby’s New York, 11 January 2001, $115,750 (Norman–Freilich). The Horblit copy of the first issue, presented to Locke, was not inscribed by Huygens himself; the Macclesfield large-paper copy was of the second issue and was not inscribed. Horblit records the large-paper copies as measuring 25.4 by 21.6 cm and as bearing the watermark of a crowned powder horn with pendant initials; the small-paper copies measure 19.7 by 15.9 cm and carry the watermark of a fool’s head and a large round form. Huygens’s work fell into comparative oblivion during the eighteenth century while the Newtonian corpuscular theory of light held the field. The wave theory was restored to centrality only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, first by Thomas Young, who used it to explain optical interference, and shortly thereafter by Augustin-Jean Fresnel, whose mathematical elaboration gave it fully modern form. It was absorbed in 1865 into Maxwell’s unified theory of electromagnetism, which identified light itself as an electromagnetic wave. Modern quantum physics has reconciled Newton’s and Huygens’s theories in discerning both corpuscular and wave characteristics in the properties of light. References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 146 — Horblit 54 — Norman 1139 — Sparrow 111 — Evans 1934, 32 — En français dans le texte 25 — Shapiro, ‘Huygens’s Traité de la Lumière and Newton’s Opticks: pursuing and eschewing hypotheses’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989), pp. 223–247 — Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720, Rochester, 2007 — DSB VI, pp. 609–610 — Yoder, Unrolling Time: Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature, Cambridge, 1988. 4to (230 × 184 mm), pp. [viii], 124, [2], 125–128, [2], 129–180, general title printed in red and black, both titles with the author’s initials ‘C. H. D. Z.’ and woodcut device, 89 woodcut diagrams in the text (scattered light foxing). Contemporary calf with Huet’s coat-of-arms stamped in gilt on both boards, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spine with red leather label (upper joint cracked but holding; stain at top of rear board, general scuffing to boards). Custom full leather box. A very good copy, entirely unrestored.
Item #5928
Price: $250,000.00
