Chymista scepticus vel dubia et paradoxa chymico-physica, circa spagyricorum principa, vulgo dicta hypostatica, Prout proponi & propugnari solent à Turba Alchimistarum. Cui pars premittitur, alterius cujusdem dissertationis ad idem argumentum spectans.
Rotterdam; A. Leers; London: excudebat J.C. veniuntque [sic] apud J. Crooke, 1662. First Latin edition, published one year after the first English edition, of this milestone in the history of chemistry. “His most important work [where he] set down his corpuscular theory of the constitution of matter, which finally freed chemistry from the restrictions of the Greek concept of the four elements, and was the forerunner of Dalton’s atomic theory” (Sparrow). “The ‘Sceptical Chymist’ is one of the great books in the history of scientific thought, for it not only marks the transition from alchemy to modern chemistry but is a plea, couched in most modern terms, for the adoption of the experimental method. Boyle inveighed against the inaccurate terminology of the ‘vulgar spagyrists’ and the ‘hermetick philosophers,’ as he termed the alchemists who refused to define their terms … He predicted that many more [elements] existed than had been described, but insisted that many substances, then thought to be elemental, were, in fact, chemical compounds. He set forth the modern distinction between a compound and a mixture, pointing out that a true chemical compound possessed properties entirely different from either of its constituents” (Fulton). “The importance of Boyle’s book must be sought in his combination of chemistry with physics. His corpuscular theory, and Newton’s modification of it, gradually led chemists towards an atomic view of matter ... Boyle distinguished between mixtures and compounds and tried to understand the latter in terms of the simpler chemical entities from which they could be constructed. His argument was designed to lead chemists away from the pure empiricism of his predecessors and to stress the theoretical, experimental and mechanistic elements of chemical science. The Sceptical Chymist is concerned with the relations between chemical substances rather than with transmuting one metal into another or the manufacture of drugs. In this sense the book must be considered as one of the most significant milestones on the way to the chemical revolution of Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century” (PMM). “Boyle’s most celebrated book is his Sceptical Chymist … It contains the germs of many ideas elaborated by Boyle in his later publications … Boyle has been called the founder of modern chemistry, for three reasons: (1) he realized that chemistry is worthy of study for its own sake and not merely as an aid to medicine or alchemy – although he believed in the possibility of the latter; (2) he introduced a rigorous experimental method into chemistry; (3) he gave a clear definition of an element and showed by experiment that the four elements of Aristotle and the three principles of the alchemists (mercury, sulphur and salt) did not deserve to be called elements or principles at all, since none of them could be extracted from bodies” (Partington II, pp. 496-7). This Latin edition is the second edition overall. There are two issues, published at Rotterdam and London (no priority established). Curiously, this copy has the title pages of both issues. RBH lists one copy of the Rotterdam issue and none of the London issue. OCLC lists six copies of the Rotterdam issue and four of the London issue in the US. The first English edition now commands a very high price – the last complete copy at auction sold for £279,800 in 2023 – so that this first Latin edition is the earliest form of Boyle’s greatest work that is accessible to the majority of collectors. Provenance: Ink stamp A*G* on Rotterdam title. “Robert Boyle was one of the most significant of British scientists. More than anyone else, he invented the modern experimental method. His profuse published findings on pneumatics, chemistry and many other scientific topics were widely influential in providing empirical support for a mechanical view of nature. He also wrote books on the philosophical aspects of science, and on religion. He was a founding member of the Royal Society, and was the doyen of that body in its formative years. “Boyle was born on 27 January 1627, youngest son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork by his second wife, Catherine. After spending two years at Eton, he travelled on the continent and received further education in Geneva from a Huguenot intellectual, Isaac Marcombes. In 1644 he returned to England and settled at Stalbridge in Dorset, where his career as an author began. At this point, his writings were on moral and literary topics rather than scientific ones, but in 1649 he ‘discovered' experimental science, and this was to dominate his entire subsequent career, in conjunction with an overriding religious commitment. From the early 1650s, he began to write treatises on scientific topics and to carry out experiments. This activity accelerated and became more focused following his move to Oxford in 1655-6 to join the group of group of natural philosophers there, and the late 1650s saw an intense burst of activity on Boyle's part, including such classic experiments as that illustrating the redintegration of saltpetre, or (in 1658-9) the series using an air-pump or vacuum chamber … “The years that Boyle spent at Oxford, prior to his move to London in 1668, also saw an extraordinarily intense programme of writing on his part. It was at this time that he began or completed the numerous books on different aspects of natural philosophy which set the pattern for his subsequent intellectual career, and on which, when he began to publish on a sustained scale from 1660 onwards, his later fame was based. These included his New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of Air and its Effects (1660), Certain Physiological Essays (1661), The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663, 1671), Experiments and Considerations touching Colours (1664), New Experiments and Observations touching Cold (1665), Hydrostatical Paradoxes (1666) and The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666)” (Robert Boyle Project). “It is difficult to realize how confused and confusing chemical reactions appeared before chemists thought in corpuscular terms. Chemistry in Boyle’s day still applied a sort of Aristotelian plenum: the only possibility of breaking down such a substance as niter was to resolve it into its component elements. Seventeenth-century elements, like the Greek elements but unlike nineteenth-century elements, were not merely the simplest bodies into which chemical substances could be analyzed or resolved; they were also the necessary ingredients of all bodies, the substances into which all bodies were analyzable. Thus, if salt was taken to be an element, then salt was present in all bodies and would appear as a product of rigorous analysis. Boyle not only thought that corpuscles were the only things universally present in all bodies; but he also suspected that none of the n accepted elements—whether the earth, air, fire, and water of the Aristotelians; the salt, sulfur, and mercury of the Paracelsans; the phlegm, oil, spirit, acid, and alkali of later chemists—was truly elementary, as the term was then understood. He tried to explain all this in the Sceptical Chymist, a curiously literary piece of polemic that is much misunderstood in modern times. Here, in spite of what is commonly said, Boyle did not give a modern definition of an element, but (specifically and intentionally) a clear definition of an element as it was understood in his day. The work is cast in a decidedly turgid dialogue form, perhaps in imitation of Galileo, perhaps merely as a relic of Boyle’s youthful literary proclivities; its chief value in its day, aside from its main message, was the wealth of chemical experiment that, like the ‘Essay on Nitre’ showed the chemist how to employ corpuscular terms in chemical explanation and also presented new chemical facts. For, prolific experimenter that he was, Boyle almost always found new chemical combinations and reactions, as well as a few new chemical substances; the best-known of these is hydrogen, which he prepared from steel filings and strong mineral acid, but there were also various copper and mercury compounds. Unlike other chemists of his day, he never stressed the novelty of such preparations, for it was the reactions and their interpretation that interested him. “Convinced as he was that the term element, as used in his day, was an erroneous and misleading concept, Boyle never approached the modern definition, which emerged during the eighteenth century as the influence of his teaching helped to weaken the older view. He seems not to have felt the need of any elements other than corpuscles; in this he was perhaps, as some of his contemporaries complained, too much a physicist and too little a chemist in his mode of thought. But this skepticism did not prevent him from recognizing at least some classes of substances by a method and in a fashion far more useful to chemistry than the old notion of element had been. Characteristically, he arrived at this classification empirically and as an outgrowth of a combination of physical and chemical investigations” (DSB). The Sceptical Chymist takes the form of a dialogue, clearly modeled on Galileo’s Dialogo, involving four participants. The Aristotelian Themistius and the Paracelsian Philoponus state their positions briefly, but soon fall silent. A wide-ranging discussion ensues between the sceptical Carneades (Boyle himself) and Eleutherius, the open-minded enquirer. Carneades argues – citing many experimental examples – that the Aristotelian four-element system and the Paracelsian three-principle model give equally inadequate explanations of what happens when complex substances are attacked by fire, or by powerful solvents. He shows that these processes often generate new compounds, rather than the promised ‘primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies’, which remain stubbornly elusive. His second proposal is more speculative – and theologically more dangerous. Boyle believed, and hoped to prove in time, that the ultimate constituents of bodies were minute atoms, differing only in ‘bulk, figure, texture and motion’. This idea was first suggested by the ancient Greek natural philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. Their successor, Epicurus, incorporated it into a godless materialistic world-view that was universally condemned by Christian theologians. Consequently, atomistic theories were suppressed for centuries. By the mid-17th century the works of the classical Greek atomists had been printed, translated and commented upon by scholars such as Pierre Gassendi, though there was still considerable hostility to them from clergy of all persuasions. But Boyle – a devout (though somewhat unorthodox) Christian who funded translations of the Gospels into many languages, including Gaelic and Turkish – saw no reason why a benign deity could not have chosen to create an atomic universe. “This work has often been acclaimed as a turning point in the evolution of modern chemistry, a crushing blow to traditional alchemy, but in fact Boyle’s message is a more complex one. In his text he made a clear distinction between ‘the true Adepti’ and ‘those Chymists that are either Cheats, or but Laborants.’ While dismissive of the latter, his view of the former was that, ‘could I enjoy their Conversation, I would both willingly and thankfully be instructed’ by them. In other words, Boyle had no quarrel with those who aspired to the higher mysteries of alchemy. Rather, his book was targeted at distillers, refiners and others, who were so preoccupied with hands-on processes that they lacked an interest in theory, and also at the authors of chemical textbooks who combined a similar preoccupation with practical preparations with a reliance on Paracelsian principles. Hence The Sceptical Chymist is primarily an attack on the Paracelsian tradition, and particularly on its theory that the world was made up of the three principles of salt, sulphur and mercury … But he also made a broader appeal for chemical investigation to be informed by a clear explanatory structure, criticising the practical chemists whom he attached in the book on the grounds that ‘there is a great Difference between being able to make Experiments, and being able to give a Philosophical Account of them’” (Hunter, pp. 119-120). “There is no other book like it in the whole history of science, none at any rate among the great classics … The ‘Sceptical Chymist’ reveals no discoveries, but it clears the ground; it is the beginning of modern chemistry if we mean by beginning the tabula rasa which will make positive work possible. It destroyed the prejudices and superstitions which were choking the growth of experimental chemistry; it discredited and helped to lay down the sanctuary of bombastic ignorance wherein the truth was bound to wither. “Thanks to Boyle’s position in the Royal Society and to the authority which he was deservedly commanding, the book attained its main purpose with remarkable speed. Within a relatively short time after its publication (say, one or two decades), Peripatetician and Spagyric theories were disqualified and gradually rejected by the new type of men of science, educated by the Riyal Society and the Académie des Sciences. Its influence was truly international, because Latin translations were published as early as 1662 both in London and in Rotterdam” (Sarton, pp. 166-7). Dibner, Heralds 39; Grolier/Horblit 14; Norman 299; Partington II, pp. 495-8; PMM 141; Sparrow, Milestones 27 (all for the first edition in English). Fulton 37. Hunter, Boyle. Between God and Science, 2009. Sarton, ‘Boyle and Bayle the Sceptical Chemist and the Sceptical Historian,’ Chymia 3 (1950), pp. 155-189.
Two parts in one vol., 8vo (170 x 103 mm), pp. [xx], 24 [Considerationes physicae]; [ii], 294 [Chymista scepticus], woodcut printer’s device on Rotterdam title. A fie copy in contemporary vellum.
Item #6240
Price: $16,500.00
