[ROYAL SOCIETY]. [NEWTON, Isaac; HOOKE, Robert; HALLEY, Edmond; FLAMSTEED, John; BOYLE, Robert; et al.].

Philosophical Transactions: giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious in many Considerable Parts of the World. Vol. I. For Anno 1665, and 1666 [– Vol. XXVII. For the Years 1731, 1732].

London: Various printers to the Royal Society, 1665-1732.

First edition of the first 426 issues, an unbroken run from March 1665 to December 1732, of the world's oldest continuous scientific journal and the single most important record of the first announcement and communication of scientific discoveries and inventions (PMM). It contains groundbreaking research by Newton — all 17 of his optical papers, and therefore his first printed contribution to science — and by Halley, Hooke, Boyle, Flamsteed, Leeuwenhoek, Cassini, Hevelius, Huygens, and many others, in astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and natural history. Thomas Henry Huxley observed in his 1866 address On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge that if every book in the world apart from the Philosophical Transactions were destroyed, the foundations of physical science would remain secure and the intellectual progress of the last two centuries largely recoverable. Long unbroken runs of the first four-and-a-half decades are now of the greatest rarity. ABPC and RBH record only two comparable sets at auction in the last three decades — Norman 1694 (Christie's New York, 15 June 1998, lot 716, $112,500) and Macclesfield 1782 (Sotheby's, 25 October 2005, lot 1782, £96,000 = $171,400) — and a set of just the seven volumes containing Newton's papers on light realised $75,600 at Christie's in October 2022.

Provenance: armorial bookplate of Sir Marcus Beresford, 1st Earl of Tyrone (1694–1763), Anglo-Irish peer and politician, on the front pastedowns; contemporary inscription at the end of one issue (January 1692/3) noting its donation by Robert Hooke; numerous manuscript corrections on more than sixty pages, additional notes on about twenty pages, and eight pages of manuscript notes on the measurement of the Earth bound in at the end.

In November 1660, members of the Oxford Philosophical Club — John Wilkins, John Wallis, Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke among them — met a group of London natural philosophers at Gresham College and agreed to form a philosophical society that would meet weekly to exchange information and to conduct experiments. The society received its charter from the newly restored Charles II in 1662, and Henry Oldenburg, a German-English diplomat and friend of Boyle, was installed as one of its two secretaries. One of the charter's terms called for the exchange of information with other learned societies, and Oldenburg almost at once began a sustained correspondence — with the Cimento Academy in Florence, the Montmor Academy in Paris, and, after its foundation in 1666, the Académie Royale des Sciences — and with hundreds of working natural philosophers in places that had no scientific society of their own. Oldenburg was fluent in German, Dutch, French, English, and Latin, and he was able to translate most foreign correspondence himself, including Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's letters on his microscopical investigations and the communications of Johannes Hevelius of Gdansk and Marcello Malpighi of Bologna. After some years writing letters without salary, Oldenburg decided to compile a monthly newsletter summarising a month's Royal Society activities and send it out to his correspondents in a single printing. On 6 March 1665 (Old Style; 16 March by the Gregorian calendar then in use on the continent), the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions appeared. It consisted of letter-excerpts, reviews and summaries of recently published books, and accounts of observations and experiments from European natural philosophers. Some of the pieces Oldenburg wrote himself, summarising the minutes of Society meetings; others he translated or adapted from printed sources; still others were composite pieces assembled from the letters of several correspondents on a common subject. After his death in 1677 the journal passed through the hands of a succession of editors, frequently also Secretaries of the Society — Edmond Halley and Hans Sloane the best-known among them — and through a succession of printers, its form and content broadly reflecting the priorities of the current editor and, to a degree, of the Society. The Royal Society assumed financial responsibility for the journal only in 1752.

Until the last third of the seventeenth century most original contributions to science appeared in books, in which an author's own findings were embedded within a systematic exposition of a larger subject. The chartering of the Royal Society in 1662 and of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666, and the launching in 1665 of the Journal des Sçavans at Paris and the Philosophical Transactions at London, gave institutional expression to a new conception of science as a cooperative enterprise: the immediate objective of the individual scientist became the experimental contribution to an eventual system of nature rather than the construction of the system itself, and the journal article began to replace the book as the unit in which that contribution was made. Newton was the first to advance through this new medium an experimentally grounded proposal for the radical reform of a scientific theory, and his proposal was the first to arouse international debate within the columns of a scientific journal. Through that exchange — in which all the participants modified their positions — a consensus of scientific opinion was produced; and within the same pattern of public announcement, discussion, and professional consensus, science has advanced ever since (Kuhn, in Cohen, Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, 2nd ed. 1978, pp. 27–29).

Newton’s seventeen optical papers, comprising his entire published optical contribution to the journal across the 1670s, run as a single intellectual sequence: the seminal 1672 New Theory paper (No. 80, pp. 3075–3087) introducing the prism experiment and the spectral analysis of white light; the catadioptrical-telescope paper (No. 81); a series of exchanges with the French Jesuit Pardies (Nos. 82, 84, 85), with Christiaan Huygens via an ‘ingenious person from Paris’ (Nos. 96, 97), and with the Liège Jesuits Linus and Lucas (Nos. 110, 121, 123, 128) — together more than half of the seventeen papers, all responding to objections raised against the New Theory. Newton’s answer to Hooke’s objections (No. 88) is the most polemical of the set, prefiguring the priority dispute that would dominate the Principia years; the answer to Sir Robert Moray on behalf of the Royal Society (No. 83) the most measured. Across the seven volumes containing them, the papers transformed optics from a body of empirical reports into a quantitative experimental science driven by decisive testing among hypotheses, and supplied the methodological core that Newton would eventually assemble, decades later, into the Opticks of 1704.

These papers together constitute the first major contribution to science made through a technical journal — the medium that rapidly became the standard mode of communication among scientists — and, as Christianson puts it, if Newton had published nothing else the optical papers alone would guarantee him a place among the immortals of modern science (Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, 1984, p. 150). They yield, further, an insight into Newton's mental processes that the Principia and the Opticks — formal, impersonal, Olympian — conceal; it is in these early, brief, sometimes hasty letters to Oldenburg, as in his notebooks and unpublished manuscripts, that the creative scientist is to be found (Kuhn, in Cohen, pp. 27–29).

When Newton was first appointed Lucasian Professor at Cambridge in 1669, he chose optics for the subject of his first lectures and researches, and by the end of that year he had worked out in detail the decomposition of a beam of white light into rays of different colours by means of a prism, the complete explanation of the rainbow following from this discovery. These results formed the subject of his Lucasian lectures in 1669, 1670, and 1671, and their principal conclusions were communicated to the Royal Society in February 1672 and printed soon afterwards in the Transactions (No. 80). Before Newton, light had been believed to be a homogeneous substance, and colour was held to be produced by the mixture of light with darkness — the prism, in the standard account, supplying the darkness that coloured the light, with all rays of white light striking the prism at the same angle being equally refracted. Newton's experiments led him to the radically different conclusion that white light is a mixture of rays of many distinct types, each refracted at a slightly different angle and each responsible for producing one spectral colour. He set up a prism near his window at Trinity College and projected the spectrum onto a wall twenty-two feet away; to prove that the prism refracted light rather than colouring it, he refracted the beam a second time back to white. The crucial experiment that confirmed the theory was to isolate a narrow ray of a single colour from the first spectrum and pass it through a second prism, where no further elongation or separation occurred — a demonstration that each spectral ray was itself unmixed and uniformly refrangible. The reception of the paper was mixed. Many contemporaries simply ignored it; Mariotte (in 1679), Pardies (1672), and Linus (1675) all claimed to have failed to replicate the basic experiments described. Rather than argue with them in detail, Newton invited his critics to repeat his experiments with greater care; they did so, without success. Others — Hooke among them, who confirmed the experiments himself before a committee of the Royal Society in April 1676 — conceded the results but held that they could be accommodated by minor modification of existing theories, making Newton's radical interpretation unnecessary. The controversy lasted six years after the paper's first appearance and left Newton conspicuously wary of publication.

Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, reported in the issue immediately following his first optical paper (No. 81), had in fact prompted the optical work rather than the other way round: the chromatic aberration of refracting lenses — their inability to bring different colours of light to a single focal point — was the original stimulus for Newton's investigation of the nature of light. Newton had sent Oldenburg his letter describing the telescope before his letter describing the new theory, and had hoped to present the telescope as a practical test-piece for the theory. Oldenburg, however, printed the material in the reverse order, the theory first, followed by the description of the instrument. The telescope made a considerable impression at the Royal Society, which promptly elected Newton a Fellow; a corresponding notice appeared in the Journal des Sçavans in February 1672, with emphasis on the instrument's compactness, and it was the telescope rather than the theory of light that first made Newton's name known on the Continent (Dilaura, Bibliotheca Opticoria 1475–1925, 2019, pp. 235–236).

Newton published three non-optical papers in his lifetime, all anonymously. His only published paper on chemistry, Scala Graduum Caloris (No. 270, April 1701, pp. 824–829), states what has since become known as Newton's law of cooling — that the rate at which a hot body loses heat is proportional to the difference between its temperature and that of its surroundings — and describes the construction of a thermometer capable of measuring temperatures up to almost 1000 °C. An Account of the Book entituled Commercium Epistolicum Collinii & Aliorum, De Analysi promota (No. 342, February 1715, pp. 173–224) is Newton's anonymous review of the Commercium epistolicum, the official report of the committee appointed by the Royal Society to adjudicate in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over priority in the invention of calculus — the most bitter and consequential priority dispute in the history of science; the Account purports to be impartial, but was in fact written, like the Commercium epistolicum itself, by Newton. In the same volume (No. 347, March 1716, pp. 399–400) appeared Newton's Problematis Mathematicis Anglis Nuper Propositi Solutio Generalis, his response to a challenge problem set by Johann Bernoulli to the English mathematicians; tradition has it that Newton solved it in a single evening after returning from a day's work at the Mint. With the exception of this minor paper, none of Newton's original work on gravitation or on mathematics was published in the Transactions. Edmond Halley's review of the Principia, however, appeared soon after its publication (No. 186, pp. 291–297) — Halley was then the journal's editor — and is prefaced by an advertisement apologising for the fact that the Transactions had been delayed for some months because Halley had had the entire care of the Principia's own edition, and had therefore, as he put it, been more serviceable to the Commonwealth of Learning in seeing Newton's book into print than he would have been in issuing his own periodical on time. Halley pointed out, with justice, that one of the most striking features of the Principia was Newton's great skill in using the new mathematics — by which Halley meant Newton's own method of infinite series.

Edmond Halley (1656–1742) was one of the most original minds of his time, and he made a long series of important contributions of his own to the Transactions. The best-known of them is Astronomiae cometicae synopsis (No. 297, March 1705, pp. 1882–1899), the first printing of the theory according to which comets belong to the solar system and move in eccentric elliptical orbits; it was here that Halley set out his method of computing the motion of comets, of establishing their periodicity in elliptical orbits, and of identifying the comet that would bear his name (DSB). The confirmation of the comet's return — in 1759, after Halley's death — was the first time that a body other than a planet had been shown to orbit the Sun, the earliest successful observational test of Newtonian physics, and a vivid demonstration of its explanatory power; the comet was named after Halley by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1759. Halley's other major contributions to the journal include his Methodus singularis (No. 348, June 1716, pp. 454–464), in which he challenged the international astronomical community to use the transits of Venus across the Sun predicted for 1761 and 1769 to transform astronomy into a fully empirical science by measuring the Earth-Sun distance — a challenge that astronomers took up, organising expeditions to the farthest corners of the globe and overcoming obstacles of every kind; A short History of the several New-Stars (No. 346, December 1715, pp. 354–356), in which he observed that the new stars of 1572 and 1604 (Tycho's and Kepler's stars) were not the only changing stars on record, that others had been observed in 1596, 1600, 1670, and 1686, some of them fading and reappearing, and one of them — Mira — appearing to wax and wane with a regular 330-day period; An Account of several Nebulae or lucid Spots like Clouds (No. 347, March 1716, pp. 390–392), in which Halley assembled the first list of known nebulae with their discoverers, crediting the Great Nebula in Orion to Huygens, the Andromeda nebula to Boulliau, and the two spherical nebulae in Centaurus and Hercules to himself; 'Of the infinity of the sphere of fix'd stars & Of the number, order and light of the fix'd stars' (No. 364, April 1720, pp. 22–26), in which Halley posed what later generations would call Olbers's paradox, a century before Olbers did; and, outside astronomy, his paper on the Breslaw life table (No. 196, January 1692/3, pp. 596–610), which produced the first life table based on sound demographic data and gave the first correct calculation of annuities, using essentially the methods still in use today — a paper of first importance in the history of statistics.

John Flamsteed (1646–1719) was, with Halley, the most important English astronomer of his generation; his major works are the Historiae coelestis (first published in 1712 without his consent by Halley and Newton) and the Atlas coelestis (published posthumously in 1729), but he also contributed more than thirty articles to the Transactions, chiefly on observational astronomy. No other Astronomer Royal before Airy displayed anything like Flamsteed's concern for the reduction and manipulation of his own data: far from bequeathing the mass of raw observations that Bradley would, he reduced and applied them himself (DSB).

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) contributed some thirty-seven papers to the Transactions (Fulton, p. 138), among them his influential questionnaire General Heads for the Natural History of a Country, a number of major experimental essays that sometimes filled a whole issue, and, most revealingly, An Experimental Discourse of Quicksilver growing hot with Gold (No. 122, February 1675/6, pp. 515–533) — a paper on a kind of mercury that would incalesce when amalgamated with gold, suggesting that Boyle had achieved the long-sought alchemical philosophical mercury capable of transmuting base metals. Boyle's trials went back to 1652, when he had received the recipe from his American mentor George Starkey; his decision to go public in 1676 signalled a newly intense period of alchemical activity on his part. The paper drew from Newton — himself a committed alchemical enthusiast — a letter to Oldenburg urging that such matters were not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there should be any truth in the Hermetic writers; Oldenburg took the hint, and the incalescence paper remained a one-off in the Transactions (Hunter, Alchemy in the Transactions, Royal Society blog, 1 July 2015).

The Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) contributed 116 articles to the Transactions over the half-century 1673–1723; the most famous of them, the letter on the protozoa (No. 133, March 1677, pp. 821–831), gives the first detailed description of protists and bacteria in a range of environments. Leeuwenhoek is universally acknowledged as the father of microbiology: he discovered both protists and bacteria, but, more than being the first to see the microscopic world of his animalcules, he was the first even to think of looking — certainly the first with the power to see. Using his own deceptively simple, single-lensed microscopes, he did not merely observe but conducted ingenious experiments, exploring and manipulating his microscopic universe with a curiosity that belied his lack of any map or bearings. The verification of Leeuwenhoek's new world by the natural philosophers of the Royal Society set out the ground rules that still define experimental science today (Lane, The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677), Philosophical Transactions B370 (2015), pp. 1–10).

Martin Lister (1639–1712) contributed in 1673 what is now regarded as the earliest journal article on palaeontology: A description of certain stones figured like plants (No. 100, pp. 6181–6191), on the preservation of St Cuthbert's beads — crinoid remains — in the approximately 350-million-year-old Carboniferous limestones of northern England. The biological nature of fossils was then controversial: Kircher had argued that they formed by abiogenic plastic forces within the rock, while Hooke and Steno had suggested they were the remains of living organisms. Lister was the first to explore how direct observation could decide between the two, making observations about what modern geobiology calls taphonomy and biogenicity criteria — observations that presage current debates about the earliest signs of life on Earth and Mars (Brasier, Philosophical Transactions A373 (2015), pp. 1–16). Other natural-historical papers scattered through the journal's first century — Account of a very odd monstrous calf, Some experiments and observations on May-dew, Some observations on strange swarms of insects — are in places fanciful but in many others acute; Hooke's own contributions, which began in the very first issue (March 1665) with A spot in one of the belts of Jupiter, are sometimes held to include the first observation of the Great Red Spot still visible on Jupiter today.

The early volumes also contain the record of the world's first experiments with blood transfusion, conducted in England in the mid-1660s. The procedure — gruesome — was first carried out between dogs, with arteries and veins in the animals' necks opened, and blood transferred from one to another through quills (most likely of goose feather) inserted into the vessels and clamped with running knots; in the physician Richard Lower's account (No. 20, pp. 353–358) the transfusion came to an end when the emittent dog fell into convulsions and died. Shortly afterwards Boyle published a remarkable set of questions about the likely effects of transfusion on the animal receiving blood (No. 22, pp. 385–388), asking whether transfusion might change a dog of one breed into another, alter its temperament, render a fierce dog cowardly, transmit satiety or hunger, obliterate learned behaviours, or make a dog forget its master — a sequence of questions which, as recent commentators have noted, read like an alchemical programme turned inward upon the living body. Researchers soon proposed transfusion into a human subject. Since the procedure generally killed the emittent, a human-to-human transfusion was thought impossible, and a sheep was settled upon as donor. The choice of human recipient fell in 1667 upon Arthur Coga — mentally unstable but sufficiently educated to report in Latin on the effects of the procedure — and the operation was performed by Lower and the physician Edmund King (No. 30, pp. 557–559), who judged that Coga had received nine or ten ounces of sheep's blood. A few days afterwards Coga reported back to the Society in Latin, and Samuel Pepys, meeting him at a dinner party shortly thereafter, found him to speak very reasonably, though cracked a little in his head.

Other contributors in these decades include Cassini (on the satellites of Jupiter), Huygens (on mechanics and optics), Malpighi, Swammerdam, Borelli, Steno, Fahrenheit, and Redi (whose experimental refutation of spontaneous generation appeared in the journal), alongside a steady stream of domestic material from Harvey, Wren, Ray, Petty, Locke, Wallis, Winthrop, Tyson, Lancisi, Leibniz, and Hales. To turn the pages of these thirty-seven volumes is to watch the first two generations of a new scientific public discover how to work together — how to record observation, propose hypothesis, invite replication, agree or disagree in print, and build, by open argument, the provisional consensus that is the hallmark of modern science.

References: Grolier/Horblit 95b — Macclesfield 1782 — Norman 1694 — PMM 148 (Vol. 1) — Brasier, Deep questions about the nature of early-life signals: a commentary on Lister (1673), Philosophical Transactions A373 (2015), pp. 1–16 — Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, 1984. Cohen (ed.), Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, 2nd ed., 1978 — Dilaura, Bibliotheca Opticoria 1475–1925, 2019 — Fulton, A Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 1932 — Lane, The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677), Philosophical Transactions B370 (2015), pp. 1–10.

37 vols. bound in 22, 4to (215 × 165 mm), containing all issues from March 1665 (No. 1) through December 1732 (No. 426), with 380 engraved plates (306 folding), 176 woodcut illustrations and diagrams, and 7 folding tables (occasional damp-staining, a few tears and small holes occasionally affecting a word or two, a few headlines shaved, the plate in No. 56 (map of part of Languedoc) with a 7 cm tear, that in No. 60 (apparatus) shaved at head, and that in No. 196 with bottom corner repaired with loss of about a quarter of the plate, relating to the dissection of a rat). Uniformly bound in eighteenth-century (probably mid-1730s) sprinkled calf, spines ruled and tooled in gilt in compartments with title and volume-number labels (some joints cracking but firm, a few labels missing, slightly rubbed). Generally very clean and well-preserved.

Item #6441

Price: $350,000.00