De magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure; Physiologia nova, plurimis & argumentis, & experimentis demonstrata.
London: Peter Short, 1600. First edition of the founding book of experimental physics in England and of the science of electricity — and, at the same time, one of the earliest printed books to explain and argue for Copernican cosmology. It is the treatise that declared the earth itself a great magnet and first called the attraction of rubbed amber electric, the word from which every later name for electricity descends. The argument does not stop at the compass. The sixth book asserts the daily rotation of the earth as a magnetic motion — the first physical cause ever offered for the earth’s movement — in print nine years before Kepler’s Astronomia nova and a decade before Galileo had published a word on the subject. A book long celebrated as the fountainhead of magnetism and electricity is thus also, and was for its first readers, a book about why the earth turns. This copy carries the printing-house’s own ink corrections in the text, and a descent written into its first leaves. It was given in 1622 by Barthold Nihus to the library of the university of Helmstedt, the first Protestant university of northern Germany, and released from that library as a duplicate. It was afterwards in the two great American history-of-science collections of Herbert McLean Evans and Joseph Halle Schaffner. It is, besides, an exceptionally fine, crisp and unpressed copy. Gilbert’s six books turned nearly two decades of trials with lodestones, iron bars and pivoted needles into a single proposition: that the compass needle answers not to the heavens but to the body of the planet, because the planet is a magnet. The work had been held back, as his collaborator Edward Wright wrote in the preliminaries, not for the nine years Horace prescribes but for almost a second nine. The book reached that proposition by a method it announces as new, that nothing about the lodestone was to be believed that had not been tried; it appeared two decades before Bacon’s Novum Organum. Its cosmology was taken exactly as seriously as its magnetism — by Kepler, who cited it when he made the sun a magnet in the Astronomia nova of 1609, and by Galileo, who declared in the Dialogo that he praised, admired and envied its author. Provenance: Barthold Nihus (1590–1657), whose gift inscription dated 1622 on the front free endleaf gives the book to the library of the university of Helmstedt; the Academia Julia Carolina at Helmstedt, with its oval stamp on the verso of the title in a wording possible only after 1745, cancelled abgegebene Dublette; Herbert McLean Evans (1882–1971), with his engraved bookplate on the front pastedown; Joseph Halle Schaffner (1897–1972), documented but without a mark in the book. On the front free endleaf, in a practised early-seventeenth-century italic, Nihus recorded his gift to the library of the illustrious and famous Julian academy at Helmstedt, his most deserving and ever-venerable nurse, closing ‘donarium hoc exiguum dedicavit Bartoldus Nihusius. Anno MDCXXII’ — Bartoldus, not Bartholdus, being one of the Latin forms of the name under which he is recorded. On the verso of the title, above Gilbert’s woodcut arms, stands the library’s oval stamp EX BIBLIOTHECA ACADEMIAE IVLIAE CAROLINAE HELMSTADII — a wording the university could use only after 1745, when Duke Karl I became its sole sovereign — struck through diagonally with the violet cancel abgegebene Dublette, the formula with which German libraries mark a released duplicate. On the front pastedown is the circular engraved bookplate of Herbert McLean Evans (1882–1971), the Berkeley endocrinologist who was the pioneer American collector of the history of science. Each stage to Evans is recorded by the book itself; the remaining link, Joseph Halle Schaffner, left no mark in it but is documented. The corrections in ink that this copy carries belong to the printing house, and they are a point of the edition. Christoph Sander’s census of 2026 found that numerous copies carry the same small set of corrections, in a hand so alike from copy to copy that they must have been entered before the bound books were sold, across twelve pages — some copies corrected on one page only, most on all twelve — all of them repairs of spelling or grammar except one: on page 47 the hand struck Non and wrote aut above it, turning an etymology of the Arabic name for amber from not snatching chaff into or snatching chaff — the one emendation of sense, by someone who understood the sentence. The trade long assumed these to be Gilbert’s own hand; Sander’s reading is that they were made in Peter Short’s shop, and whether the author stood at the corrector’s elbow he leaves as speculation. One of the corrections, the deletion of a stray è in Wright’s own address, was carried into type by a stop-press resetting of the fourth preliminary leaf found in eight or nine copies — the only true state point in the edition; of the copies Sander examined for that leaf, 139 carry the ink deletion, 34 are uncorrected and eight have the printed cancel. The present copy has the shop hand at work in the Greek of the Aristotle quotation on page 11, at pages 14, 22 and 47, and in the upper lodestone woodcut on page 130, where the letters E and F are supplied in ink, with further contemporary ink corrections on its second page, where the printed Chinocrates becomes Dinocrates, and in the margin of page 72. William Gilbert (1544–1603) wrote it at the summit of a medical career that ran entirely through the institutions of the court. Born at Colchester, educated at St John’s College, Cambridge (MD 1569), he settled in London, was a Censor of the College of Physicians by 1581, a client of Leicester and then of the Cecils, was named in 1588 with his friend Lancelot Browne as a fit physician for the Armada fleet, became President of the College in 1600, the year of the book, and physician to Elizabeth I, continued briefly by James I before plague carried him off in November 1603. De magnete was the only book he published; his papers and instruments, bequeathed to the College, burned with it in 1666. Its experiments were made at his own expense at Wingfield House on St Peter’s Hill, and the book wears its method on its margins: Gilbert explains in his preface that the larger and smaller asterisks printed beside the text grade his experiments and discoveries by their importance and subtlety, so that a reader can see at a glance where the argument rests on a trial rather than on an authority. The tone is set on the first pages, where the accumulated magnetic lore of antiquity — garlic that disarms the lodestone, the diamond that rivals it — is dismissed by the simple expedient of trying it; Stephen Pumfrey singles out the refutation of Porta’s diamond, tested with seventy-five stones before witnesses and found to do nothing at all. Gilbert named the compilers who had copied one another for centuries without touching a lodestone, and left their causes, as his second book puts it, for roaches and moths. The argument is built on one instrument and one inference. A spherical lodestone — Gilbert’s terrella, the little earth — reproduces in miniature every directional behaviour a compass shows on the globe: the needle’s settling north and south, its deviation from true north, its dip below the horizon. The inference is the founding move of geophysics: the earth is not surrounded by some magnetic influence proceeding from the pole star or the heavens, it is a magnet, and its magnetic poles are its geographical poles. Around that core the six books distribute the five magnetic movements Gilbert distinguished — coition, direction, variation, declination and revolution — each demonstrated on the terrella with the small pivoted needle he called the versorium, and each surrounded by the orbis virtutis, the sphere of virtue through which a magnet acts without contact. Gilbert would not even call the first of them attraction: it is coition, a coming-together of two bodies, because the lodestone and the iron move to each other, and he distinguished the magnetic mass of a body from its mere weight. The dip of the needle, which Robert Norman had described in The Newe Attractive of 1581 without being able to explain it, becomes on the terrella a simple function of distance from the pole. Book II contains the digression that founded a second science: separating the attraction of rubbed amber from magnetic coition, Gilbert catalogued the substances that attract when rubbed, called them electrica, and devised the versorium as a detector of the effect — the first electroscope. Book IV derives the variation of the compass from the unevenness of the globe, a lodestone crumbled at one side standing for the Atlantic basin; Book V makes dip a function of latitude, and the large folding woodcut, printed to be placed between pages 200 and 201, is the navigator’s instrument for reading latitude from the dip-needle in thick weather when no star can be taken. The famous blacksmith hammering a glowing bar held north and south, the whole suite of some ninety woodcuts cut into the text at the point of argument, and the informants named in passing — Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish among them, consulted on the behaviour of the needle beyond the line — make the folio a working book of the Elizabethan sea as much as a philosophy of nature. The preliminaries carry an address to the reader by Edward Wright, the mathematician who had put the Mercator projection on a sound footing in his Certaine Errors in Navigation of 1599, and that address is more than an endorsement. Mark Ridley, Gilbert’s fellow physician, magnetician and lodger, recorded in 1617 what Wright had admitted to him: that he had taken great pains in correcting the printing of the book, that he was the author of chapter 12 of the fourth book (the method of finding variation from the fixed stars, with its star table), and that Gilbert himself was not skilful in Copernicus — Ridley’s circle judged the Copernican demonstrations in Gilbert’s house to have come from Joseph Jessop, a physician who lodged with him — while Wright, whom Ridley knew as most perfect in Copernicus from his youth, denied any hand in the cosmological sixth book. Pumfrey, the standard modern authority, concludes that Wright collaborated so closely that he actually wrote parts of it. Wright’s address frames the book as a contribution to navigation before it is a philosophy — the dip method alone, he says, would be worth no small sum of gold to mariners — and then turns, fifteen years before Galileo’s letter to Christina of Lorraine, to the scriptural objection to the earth’s motion, answering that Moses and the prophets did not set out to teach physical niceties but accommodated themselves to common speech as nurses do to infants. It is one of the earliest printed defences of the earth’s daily rotation by an Englishman, and it closes with the pun that the magnet books will keep Gilbert’s memory longer than any magnate’s monument. Peter Short, printing on Bread Street Hill, a short walk from Gilbert’s house, gave the book a folio setting that Sander judges printed with much care: his brazen-serpent device on the title, Gilbert’s own armorial woodcut filling the verso, a headpiece with the royal arms over the first chapter, decorated initials through the six books, and the diagrams cut into the text where the argument needs them rather than gathered at the end. The preliminaries are a small apparatus in themselves — Gilbert’s preface to the candid reader, Wright’s address, a glossary of the book’s new and specialised terms (electrica, versorium, terrella, verticitas among them) and the index of chapters — and the errata stand at the foot of the last page. The graded asterisks in the margins make a large scientific folio unusually navigable; the whole was designed to be worked from at a table with a lodestone to hand, which is how Gilbert expected it to be read. The daily rotation of the earth is the business of Book VI, and the book is more Copernican than the phrase ‘the earth is a magnet’ conveys. Gilbert asserts the diurnal rotation of the earth as the fifth magnetic movement, its axis held steady by the same virtue; he honours Copernicus as the restorer of astronomy and dissolves the sphere of the fixed stars into lights scattered at vast and varying distances — which Silvanus Thompson called his one contribution to the science of astronomy; he answers Tycho Brahe’s falling-body objections by name and tells the theologians to wipe out with sponges the old women’s tale of a heaven spinning once a day. The annual orbit he would not assert: he speaks of another motion about which he is not disputing, and in the Latin of the sixth book the earth turns ad solem, toward the sun, where Copernicus’s circa solem was available and not used; the one clean reference to the earth’s motion in orbe magno is expressly placed under the hypotheses of the moderns. Gilbert may have taken the idea of rotation from Petrus Peregrinus, whose thirteenth-century letter on the magnet claimed that a spherical lodestone suspended from its poles turns once in twenty-four hours; he tried it, would not grant it to ordinary magnets, and reserved it for the prime magnet, the earth. The two closing chapters on the precession of the equinoxes after Copernicus are the most technical astronomy in the book. It was this sixth book that made the work dangerous: Thompson records copies in Italy mutilated or branded with a cross, and the Collegio Romano’s copy with Book VI torn out; Galileo says in the Dialogo that his own copy came as a present from a Peripatetic who wished, he thought, to protect his library from its contagion, and after the warmest praise adds that he could have wished Gilbert a little more of the mathematician. Bacon, in the Novum Organum, made Gilbert his example of the man who builds a whole philosophy out of one favourite pursuit. Kepler had already cited him in the Apologia against Ursus around 1601, and in chapter 34 of the Astronomia nova made the sun a rotating magnet on the strength of the Englishman’s demonstration that ‘the earth itself is a big magnet’ — the magnetic philosophy supplying, for the first time, a physical reason why a planet should move. The magnetic philosophy travelled faster than its cosmology, and the two were soon pulled apart. The earliest readers Sander’s census can document are Kepler and Bacon, whose copies are untraced, and Galileo, whose copy survives; a public disputation on the motion of the magnet was being held at Danzig by 1615; and the demand that Peter Short’s edition could not meet was answered from Stettin, where Wolfgang Lochmann re-edited the text in 1628 and Georg Götzke printed a fresh edition in 1633 for a Central European readership. On the Catholic side the book was read with the sixth book held at arm’s length: Niccolò Cabeo’s Philosophia magnetica of 1629 accepted Gilbert’s experiments and repudiated his moving earth, and Athanasius Kircher’s Magnes of 1641 made magnetism an argument for the earth’s rest. That is where the present copy’s first owner reappears: the man who sent this De magnete to a Lutheran university in 1622 spent his Catholic maturity as Kircher’s correspondent — some forty letters from Amsterdam, on antiquities rather than lodestones, that fed Dutch material into Kircher’s Egyptology — so that the book’s donor and the author of the great Jesuit answer to it stood, a generation later, in the same circle. The gift of 1622 has a biography behind it. Barthold Nihus (1590–1657), born into a poor family at Holtorf on the Weser, entered the Academia Julia at Helmstedt in 1607 to study philosophy and medicine, served as famulus to the logician Cornelius Martini, took his Magister in 1612, and was the pupil and friend of Georg Calixt; the mathematics chair through his student years was Heinrich Schaper’s, who announced planetary theory according to the hypotheses of Copernicus and the Alphonsines. Nihus then tutored at Jena, travelled in 1614 to Cologne, Leiden and Antwerp, and from 1616 was tutor to the princes at the Weimar court — until 1622, the year of this inscription, when he left Weimar for Cologne and entered the Catholic Church. The donarium was therefore sent to his old university from outside it, by a man in the act of leaving the Lutheran world that had formed him, and it reads, though no document says so, as a parting present to the nutrix he could no longer serve. The rest of his life: abbot of Ilfeld, a decade of exile in Amsterdam, suffragan for the Thuringian lands of the archbishop of Mainz from 1654 and titular bishop of Mysia from 1655, dying at Erfurt in 1657. The library he gave to was the one Duke Julius founded with his university in 1576 and Duke Friedrich Ulrich enlarged in 1618 with the ducal collections of Wolfenbüttel; the copy was still on its shelves when the stamp with the later eighteenth-century wording was struck, and the two old paper labels on the spine, both numbered 505, may belong to that shelving. After the university was suppressed in 1810 its books went to Göttingen and back, and in April 1913 more than two-thirds of what remained in the Juleum at Helmstedt was transferred to the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, which already owned Duke August’s own copy, in his collection by October 1626; the violet stamp-ink of the cancel puts the release no earlier than the later nineteenth century, and that incorporation is the most plausible occasion for it, though the duplicate’s exit is not documented. The bookplate is that of Herbert McLean Evans, professor of anatomy at Berkeley and first director of its Institute of Experimental Biology, whose laboratory charted the development of the vascular system, worked out the oestrous cycle and the pituitary’s part in reproduction, isolated growth hormone and discovered vitamin E — four discoveries that Chauncey Leake thought might each have merited a Nobel Prize — and who was, as a collector, the pioneer American collector of the history of science. His Epochal Achievements in the History of Science (Berkeley, 1934), the catalogue of an exhibition of 114 first editions from his own shelves, was the first list of the high spots of science and the forerunner of Dibner’s Heralds of Science of 1955 and Horblit’s hundred books of 1964; Gilbert is its number 26. Evans formed and dispersed seven successive science collections of more than 20,000 volumes in all. From Evans the book passed to Joseph Halle Schaffner (1897–1972), the Chicago clothier of Hart, Schaffner & Marx, whose history-of-science library, assembled largely at the Halle, Andrade and Silver sales of the 1960s, went to the University of Chicago at his death; this copy was not among the books bequeathed; the Chicago De magnete is another copy, from the Andrade sale. Sander’s census records 281 copies of the 1600 printing against 86 of the Stettin reprint of 1628 and 106 of 1633, and notes that Peter Short printed the book with much care but in too small a run to meet the demand, which is why the continental piracies followed. When Silvanus Thompson, who translated the book and was among the first to count its surviving copies, wrote around 1905 that only 77 copies were known and that Gilbert’s folio was rarer than the Shakespeare First Folio, he was wrong about the number but right about the shape of the survival: the great majority of the copies whose present owner is known are in institutional libraries, and the census’s roll of owners runs from Galileo and Ben Jonson to Gabriel Naudé and, on circumstantial evidence, Seth Ward, with Kepler’s and Bacon’s copies lost and Hooke’s untraced. What Nihus sent to Helmstedt in 1622 was the first physical account of why the earth should turn, and it had a century of life ahead of it. Kepler built the Astronomia nova of 1609 on a magnetic sun; Galileo carried the magnetic philosophy into the Dialogo of 1632 as the natural ally of the moving earth; Christopher Wren in 1657 named Gilbert and Galileo together as the two assertors of philosophical liberty, and with Wilkins and Hooke carried the idea of attractive celestial forces into the generation of Isaac Newton, whose Principia of 1687 replaced the magnetic earth with the gravitating one. References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 54 — Evans, Epochal Achievements 26 — Grolier/Horblit 41 — Norman 905 — PMM 107 — STC 11883 — ESTC S121112 — Wellcome 2830 — Wheeler Gift 72 — Honeyman 1498 — Ekelöf 61 — Sparrow 85 — McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices 119 — J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1979), pp. 169–179 — Stephen Pumfrey, ‘William Gilbert,’ in P.M. Harman and S. Mitton (eds), Cambridge Scientific Minds (Cambridge, 2002), and Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (2002) — Christoph Sander, ‘Magnetic margins: insights into the digital descriptive census of William Gilbert’s De Magnete,’ Annals of Science (2026), pp. 4–5, 8–9 — Duane H.D. Roller, The De Magnete of William Gilbert (1959) — Mark Ridley, Magneticall Animadversions (1617), pp. 9–10 — Johannes Kepler, Astronomia nova (1609), chapters 34 and 57, trans. W.H. Donahue (1992) — Galileo, Dialogo (1632), Third Day, trans. S. Drake — Silvanus P. Thompson (trans.), On the Magnet (Gilbert Club, 1900), notes — E.C. Amoroso and G.W. Corner, ‘Herbert McLean Evans 1882–1971,’ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 18 (1972) — Jacob Zeitlin, ‘Herbert M. Evans, Pioneer Collector,’ Isis 62 (1971), 507–509 — NDB (Nihus) — Fabian, Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände (Helmstedt; Herzog August Bibliothek) — The Joseph Halle Schaffner Collection in the History of Science (University of Chicago Library, 1977), no. 75 (the Chicago copy). Folio in sixes (280 × 188 mm), *8 A–V6, pp. [16], 240, with the large folding woodcut plate bound at p. 200 (headed ‘Place this betwixt the 200 and 201 folioes’); woodcut printer’s device of Peter Short on the title (McKerrow 119), large woodcut arms of Gilbert on the verso, woodcut headpiece with the royal arms on p. 1, 88 woodcut diagrams and illustrations in the text (four full-page), woodcut initials and head- and tail-pieces, printed marginal asterisks, larger and smaller, marking the experiments; errata at the foot of p. 240. The printing-house ink corrections present at pp. 2, 11, 14, 22, 47, 72 and 130. Contemporary limp vellum with overlapping fore-edges, sewing supports laced through the cover, early manuscript title in ink on the spine (faded), two old paper shelf-labels on the spine both numbered ‘505’, plain endpapers, edges untrimmed; vellum soiled and spotted, headcap worn. A few small spots to the folding plate; a fine, crisp, unpressed copy.
Item #6244
Price: $50,000.00
