Historia insectorum generalis, ofte algemeene verhandeling van de bloedeloose dierkens.
Utrecht: Meinardus van Dreunen, 1669. First edition, in an exceptional copy with the plates in contemporary hand-colour, of the founding work on insect development — the book in which Swammerdam overthrew the ancient doctrine of metamorphosis, the belief that the caterpillar dies in its chrysalis and an entirely new creature springs from it, a change ‘comparable to the alchemical transmutation of a base metal into gold’ (Winsor). Against what he himself reckoned as two thousand years of authority, counting from Aristotle, Swammerdam argued that no such transmutation exists anywhere in nature. The butterfly’s wings and limbs grow slowly and invisibly beneath the caterpillar’s skin, and what looks like sudden transformation is ordinary, gradual growth — the same epigenesis by which the chick develops in the egg. He demonstrated it at the dissecting table: a mature caterpillar, plunged in boiling water and hardened in wine and vinegar, can be skinned to reveal the folded rudiments of the butterfly already forming beneath. On that demonstration he built the first general developmental classification of the insects, four orders of gradual change embracing every bloodless creature. In a single folding table he then extended the four orders from the louse to the frog and the carnation — one law of growth for the whole of living nature. The four orders became the template on which John Ray and Martin Lister built insect classification, and their descendants, at a distance, are the life-history divisions of the modern textbooks. The thirteen plates are Swammerdam’s own work: he drew every figure himself from his dissections and rearing vessels, and the unsigned engravings reproduce his drawings with their characteristic dark grounds, each pale insect body modelled against a nimbus of black cross-hatching — the eggs, larvae, nymphs and adults of the louse, the dragonfly and the ant in their numbered stages, a great scorpion spread across a folding sheet, the cabbage butterfly rising through caterpillar and chrysalis to the spread imago, and two water-fleas among the earliest published figures of Daphnia. The plates of the orders are captioned in Latin and Dutch alike — nympha and Dier-popken, learned Europe and the Amsterdam reader addressed in one breath. Part of the original drawings survives, among material Swammerdam prepared for a revised edition that never appeared (Cole, fig. 114). Their graphic method is itself an argument. Where Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) — a book Swammerdam cites — had presented its famous flea and louse as spectacular giants floating free of any scale, Swammerdam shows each creature twice, the magnified figures keyed by letters and the life-size ones by numerals, so that on the mosquito plate two gnats of natural size sit at the corner of a sheet dominated by their monstrous magnified twin. The reader is never allowed to forget that the marvel is a real animal of ordinary size, and that the same laws run through great and small. The plates were issued uncoloured, and hand-coloured copies of this book are of exceptional rarity: the only other coloured copy that has been traced carries colouring dated by an inscription to 1745, well after publication, whereas the washes of the present copy — yellow, olive, brown and pink, with touches of turquoise at the insects’ eyes — are in the restrained palette of the seventeenth century itself. The colourist worked with judgement, reserving the fullest colour for the finished insects — the scorpion in deep browns and olive, the louse pink-bodied on its black ground, the butterflies cream and yellow with turquoise eyes — while leaving the anatomical mosquito and ant plates almost in pure line, the engraved detail legible through the lightest of washes. Colouring was a living practice in the Dutch natural-history trade of these decades: Johannes Goedaert’s Metamorphosis naturalis (1660–69) was sold both plain and coloured at a premium, and Swammerdam himself owned a coloured copy of Moffet’s insect book, as the Danish scholar Ole Borch noted on a visit in 1662. No coloured issue, however, is recorded for the present book: colour here is the choice of an early owner, not of the publisher. The chief target was William Harvey’s celebrated account of generation. Harvey had divided development into two modes: the chick grows in the hen’s egg by epigenesis, acquiring its parts one after another and enlarging as it does so; but the butterfly arises in its chrysalis by metamorphosis, the parts coming into existence simultaneously and full-sized, and the lower creatures could arise the same way out of putrid matter. Swammerdam consciously and energetically set out to destroy this supposed difference between the development of higher and lower animals, and with it both spontaneous generation and the Aristotelian axiom that insects lack internal anatomy. His evidence was of two kinds: dissection of larvae and chrysalides before the adult emerges, and comparison across the insect world, from creatures whose changes are partial to those with none at all. The insight came from the water. In the aquatic larvae of the mayflies, which he had studied since 1661, and of the dragonflies he watched at Saumur in 1663–64, the growing wings can be seen folded in protuberances on the larva’s back, enlarging from moult to moult; there is no difficulty in recognising the process as one animal changing form as it grows, just as the chick must change in appearance as well as size before becoming a hen. Believing the laws of nature to be regular and simple, Swammerdam sought one model for all development: the changes that seem metamorphic differ only in going on invisibly, beneath the skin. In his Leiden medical thesis of 1667 he had promised to explain the caterpillar’s change; by 1669 he had found the technique — the boiled and skinned caterpillar — and was careful about what it did and did not show. The rudiments are discernible only in the mature caterpillar on the verge of its change; in a younger, feeding caterpillar they can scarcely be distinguished, not because they are minute but because they are still too fluid, confused with the surrounding tissue. He was confident enough, even so, to declare that he had solved by experience — ondervinding, the word that runs through his dedication and his notice to the reader — the riddle that had defeated the most brilliant minds of antiquity. Aristotle, Pliny, Aldrovandi and Moffet are scorned in these pages as readers of books rather than of nature — an aggression Eric Jorink reads as religious at root, for in Swammerdam’s eyes the naturalist who repeated fables instead of observing God’s regular laws was failing the Creator whose glory the smallest creature displays. The four orders themselves are set out with the economy of a theorem. In the first, the animal hatches from the egg in its adult form and thereafter only grows and moults: the louse, whose stages from nit to breeding adult open the plate sequence. In the second, the wings grow gradually and visibly outside the body, and the animal never wholly loses its motion or appetite: the dragonfly and the mayfly. In the third, the adult parts grow folded beneath the larval skin and the pupa rests without feeding, and here Swammerdam distinguished the thin-skinned nymph — the ant, the bee, the beetle, in which every future limb can be traced through the pupal envelope — from the hard chrysalis of the butterflies and moths, his ‘golden pupa’. In the fourth, the pupa is concealed inside the larva’s own unshed skin, as in the flies — a difference, he insisted, of appearance and not of essence. The 48-page second part of the book is a systematic key to the plates, explaining the four orders figure by figure; and the whole argument is then compressed into the letterpress folding table, a general comparison — ‘Over-een-koominge’, agreement — of the changes and growths of living things, seven columns setting the louse, the dragonfly, the ant, the moth, the fly, the frog and the carnation stage by stage against one another, from egg, skin or seed to breeding adult, flowering plant and full-grown frog. The frog and the carnation are the point: one law of budding-forth governs insect, vertebrate and plant alike, and the metamorphosis of the tadpole is no more a transmutation than the sprouting of a flower. The purpose, as Mary Winsor observed in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, was never taxonomic — it was a theory of development, from which others would make a system. It was the decisive book of the decade in which European science first took the insect seriously. Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) had shown what the microscope could make of a flea; Redi’s Esperienze (Florence, 1668) had used controlled experiment — meat in sealed and in open flasks — to deny that maggots arise of themselves from putrefaction; Johannes Goedaert, painting from his rearing boxes at Middelburg through the 1660s, had documented metamorphosis season by season while still allowing, in his final volume, that some insects breed from decay; and Malpighi’s De bombyce anatomised a single species with unprecedented fineness. What none of them supplied was a theory. The four orders gave the decade its synthesis: development, not transmutation; the egg of a female of the same species, never putrid matter; internal anatomy everywhere, waiting for the dissector. When Maria Sibylla Merian’s flower-strewn Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung began to appear ten years later, gradual insect development had been argued in print, order by order, for a decade. The book appeared, in November 1669, at a moment of intense pressure. Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) had matriculated in medicine at Leiden in October 1661 in the most brilliant anatomical cohort of the century — Regnier de Graaf, Frederik Ruysch and Niels Stensen (Steno) were fellow students under Sylvius and van Horne, and the insect collection Swammerdam had begun in his apothecary father’s celebrated cabinet of curiosities was already famous among them — and had spent 1664–65 in Paris as the guest of Melchisédech Thévenot, in whose informal academy savants gathered to watch experiments and dispute Cartesian ideas. Back in Amsterdam he joined the Private College of physicians around Gerhard Blasius and Matthew Slade — whose Latin elegy among the preliminaries of the present book is headed with an address to Harvey himself, a courtesy with an edge — and in the winter of 1666–67 he dissected insects at Leiden while collaborating with Johannes van Horne on the anatomy of the uterus; his doctorate followed on 22 February 1667. Then, while the present sheets were in the press, Thévenot sent him Marcello Malpighi’s De bombyce (London, 1669), the first anatomical monograph on an invertebrate — and in it the rudiments of the silkworm moth’s wings and legs, found beneath the skin of the caterpillar. For Swammerdam, who regarded the demonstration of those hidden parts as his own great achievement, the arrival was a blow, and he answered it in the only way still open: he inserted into the printing — the passage names the year itself — a defence that called his witnesses. Thévenot himself and the Florentine man of letters Lorenzo Magalotti, of the suite of Cosimo de’ Medici on his Dutch tours, had already seen him display the limbs of the future butterfly beneath the caterpillar’s skin — and the Grand Prince of Tuscany, the future Cosimo III, had deigned to view the parallel demonstrations on the frog. Boerhaave, in the life prefixed to the 1737–38 Biblia, told the story as court theatre — the Tuscan prince watching the caterpillar opened during his tour of 1668 — but the printed book claims only the witnesses, not the occasion, and it is the printed claim that carried the priority. The Royal Society took notice: the Philosophical Transactions for October 1670 introduced ‘this Curious and Philosophical Book, written in the Belgick tongue’ to English readers, Henry Oldenburg, who had word of the book within weeks of publication, wrote to Malpighi that the Dutchman had praised De bombyce and hoped his own work might appear in Latin, and Martin Lister sent the Transactions his notes upon the book from York the following summer. The imprint is Utrecht rather than Amsterdam: Meinardus van Dreunen, ordinary printer to the university, set the quarto with its woodcut headpieces and floriated initials, and prefixed a title-page whose long Dutch subtitle is the thesis of the book in miniature — the true grounds of the slow growth of limbs clearly set forth, and the common error of transformation, otherwise called metamorphosis, effectually washed away. Swammerdam dedicated it to four burgomasters and governors of Amsterdam headed by Coenraad van Beuningen, the republic’s leading diplomat, with Cornelis van Vlooswijck, Nicolaes Pancras and Frans Reael beside him, and addressed a separate ‘necessary notice’ to the truth-loving reader. The title-page announces ‘Het Eerste Deel’ — the first part — but no second part ever appeared — the book, as William Ashworth remarks, is, ‘despite its title… only a prelude to such a history’: Swammerdam’s own manuscript of the treatise, prepared with additions for a new printing, survives at Leiden, and the continuation his readers awaited came only through other hands half a century later. The book meanwhile crossed the barrier its Dutch had imposed: a French translation appeared at Utrecht in 1682 — greeted in the Journal des Sçavans with the reflection that good books cannot be translated into too many languages — and was reissued there in 1685, and the Latin version of Hendrik Christiaan Henninius, published by Luchtmans at Leiden in 1685 and reissued in 1693 and 1733, became the form in which most of learned Europe read it. Its readers made it what Eric Jorink has called ‘the foundation of an entirely new view of the insect kingdom’. John Ray, working up Francis Willughby’s papers, took the book as his template — of all the entomological literature it ‘seems to me the best of all’, he wrote to James Petiver — and in the Methodus insectorum (1705) and the Historia insectorum (1710) he and Lister transformed Swammerdam’s four orders of change into orders of insects, the beginning of classification by life-history; the nineteenth century would distil that inheritance into the ametabolous, hemimetabolous and holometabolous development of the modern textbooks. Réaumur’s great Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (1734–42) worked in the same tradition, opening in agreement with Redi, Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek that no insect ever engenders an insect of another species — the very Redi whom Swammerdam already cites in these pages. Swammerdam himself published only one further entomological book in his lifetime, the Ephemeri vita of 1675, in which the anatomy of the mayfly became the occasion for an extended hymn to the Creator: by the early 1670s, under the influence of the Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon, he had come to fear that he pursued his studies for himself rather than for God, and he gradually gave up research. He died in Amsterdam in February 1680, five days past his forty-third birthday, leaving his entomological manuscripts, carefully ordered, to Thévenot. Provenance: Lin Buijnsters-Smets (1937–2021), the Dutch art historian, with her bookplate on the front paste-down. She took her Nijmegen doctorate with a monograph on the Antwerp painter Jan Massys (1995); with her husband, Piet J. Buijnsters (1933–2022), emeritus professor at Nijmegen and the historian of the Dutch book trade, she collected from their student days onwards, building a celebrated private library of the Dutch book that ranged from the sixteenth century to about 1870, with its weight on the illustrated book. Together the couple wrote the standard bibliographies of the Dutch children’s book — the Bibliografie van Nederlandse school- en kinderboeken 1700–1800 (1997) and Lust en leering (2001), the latter crowned with the Menno Hertzberger Prize — and of Dutch paper toys (Papertoys, 2005), and their working collection of children’s books entered Tilburg University Library in 2014. A hand-coloured Swammerdam is the point where the Dutch illustrated book and the science of the Dutch golden age meet. Herman Boerhaave bought Swammerdam’s manuscripts in 1727 and made the text of the present book, lightly revised, the backbone of the Bybel der Natuure (Biblia naturae; Leiden, 1737–38), the great bilingual folio in which, fifty-seven years after his death and as his will had provided, the unpublished researches — the celebrated bee studies among them — finally appeared, with more than fifty plates engraved from his drawings; Cole judged it ‘the foundation of our modern knowledge of the structure, metamorphosis and classification of insects’. References: Garrison-Morton 294 — Hagen 2:208 — Krivatsy 11599 — Nissen ZBI 4052 — Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy (1944), pp. 270–305 — M.P. Winsor, ‘Swammerdam, Jan,’ Dictionary of Scientific Biography XIII, pp. 168–175 — E. Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Leiden, 2010), ch. 4 — M. Cobb, ‘Reading and writing The Book of Nature: Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680),’ Endeavour 24 (2000), pp. 122–128 — M. Cobb, ‘Malpighi, Swammerdam and the colourful silkworm,’ Annals of Science 59 (2002), pp. 111–147. 4to (197 × 150 mm): *–3*4 4*2 A–X4 a–f4 (X3 mis-signed Y3), pp. xxviii, 168, 48, with 13 engraved plates, at least eight folding, and a letterpress folding comparative table paginated 49; title with small woodcut vignette, woodcut headpieces and decorated initials. The plates in contemporary hand-colour, in wash tones of yellow, olive, brown and pink with touches of turquoise. Contemporary Dutch vellum, covers with a double gilt fillet border, gilt fleurons at the corners and a large central gilt medallion within a lozenge of scrollwork, spine with six horizontal double gilt rulings. A fine copy with no restoration.
Item #6136
Price: $18,500.00
