Traité physique et historique de l’aurore boréale.
Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1733. First edition, presentation copy to James Stirling, of this important milestone in the emergence of geophysics, in which Mairan put forwardthe first rational and scientific (for the time) explanation of the aurora borealis: he proposed that the Northern Lights are caused by the Sun, as the interaction of the atmosphere with zodiacal light (at the time, the aurorae were thought to be ‘flames’ caused by sulfurous effluvia emanating from the Earth).Mairan also discusses the formation of cometary tails, criticizing Newton’s theory. James Stirling was one of the foremost mathematicians of eighteenth-century Europe. A protégé of Sir Isaac Newton, he played a pivotal role in the Newtonian revolution in mathematics. Edmond Halley suggested that the aurora was linked to Earth’s magnetic field and proposed a ‘hollow Earth’ with luminous inner shells whose escaping gases caused the lights, publishing his findings after spectacular displays in 1716. “Because of the fears generated by popular observations of northern lights in France in 1716, Mairan (1678-1771) was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences to give a rational explanation of the phenomenon. Unlike Edmond Halley, Mairan ascribed a major role to the Sun in the appearance of the aurora and denied an electric or magnetic origin … Finally, at the end of the 19th century, when aurora studies benefited from the recent discoveries of new radiations such as cathode rays, Mairan appeared as an important precursor of the new explanation of northern lights and the emergence of geophysics” (Le Gars, p. 311). “The first step toward a unified theory of aurora, the zodiacal light and cometary tails was taken by Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan (1678–1771), a French Cartesian physicist and a member of the Academy of Sciences. In his book about the physics and history of the Northern Lights, which appeared in 1733, he describes the phenomenon in detail, develops his theory of aurora, and considers the relationship between the solar atmosphere and cometary tails. Mairan suggests that the solar atmosphere (which is denser in its equatorial parts) is extended as far as the orbit of the earth, but its size is variable. When the particles of the solar atmosphere pass the zone of equal gravity – points where the gravitational forces of the sun and the earth on a given particle are equal – they flow into the atmosphere of the earth and glow as an aurora. The difference in the densities of the incoming solar material causes the different colors and distributions of the aurora displays, and the slower angular motion of the earth in the poles causes the cascade of the solar material not to scatter and to be seen conspicuously in the polar regions” (Heidarzadeh, p. 154). The work contains a scientific analysis, an extensive historical account of all recorded appearances of the lights, and many references to Descartes, Cassini, Euler, and Newton. The plates contain astronomical maps as well as sketches of the aurora at different times and locations. Mairan was elected to numerous scientific societies and made key discoveries in a variety of fields including ancient texts and astronomy. His observations and experiments also inspired the beginning of what is now known as the study of biological circadian rhythms. Provenance: Presented by Mairan to James Stirling (1692-1770) (inscribed by the author ‘Pour Monsieur Stirling de la Société Royale des Sciences par son très humble et très obeissant serviteur Dortous de Mairan, a Paris ce 14e février 1734’ on an initial blank). James Stirling was born on 11 May 1692 at Garden House, near Stirling, Scotland; this book remained in the library at Garden until 2025. Little is known of Stirling’s early life until his arrival at Oxford in 1710. In 1715 John Keill noted in a letter to Newton that the problem of orthogonal trajectories proposed by Leibniz had recently been solved by ‘Mr. Stirling an under-graduate here’. His first book, Lineae tertii ordinis Neutonianae, a commentary on Newton's classification of cubic curves, was printed at the Sheldonian Theatre in April 1717, with Newton named as a subscriber. By that time Stirling's status as a non-juring student and his alleged involvement in Jacobite agitation had already led to trouble with the university authorities, and his scholarships appear to have been withdrawn shortly before the book was published. He therefore left Oxford without a degree, taking up an invitation to Venice from Nicolas Tron, the Venetian ambassador to London. Stirling was in Italy for several years and became known in his family as ‘the Venetian’ in consequence. During this time Stirling attended the university of Padua and made the acquaintance of scholars including Nicolaus Bernoulli. In 1719 he wrote to Newton from Venice thanking him for an unspecified act of generosity, usually interpreted as a gift of money, and in the same year communicated to the Royal Society his paper ‘Methodus differentialis Newtoniana illustrata’, the basis for his magnum opus, the Methodus differentialis sive tractatus de summatio et interpolatio serierum infinitarum, which was published in 1730. “It seems that Mairan began to foresee the system that he would publish in 1733 as early as the middle of the 1720s, probably on the occasion of the great aurora borealis of November 1726, which he witnessed … Mairan’s treatise was not finalized until 1731 and published two years later. “The idea behind this system was expressed 40 years ago by Jean-Dominique Cassini after his discovery of zodiacal light, that a ‘very large sphere of atoms concentric to the Earth’ can stop and bring together in abundance ‘the sphere of atoms of the sun’. It is this concept that Mairan took back by taking it further, and by introducing the Newtonian attraction as a driving force of the incorporation of solar matter to the Earth’s atmosphere. Based on the fact that the top of the zodiacal light frequently deviates from the sun of an angle higher than 90°, which shows that it can reach the terrestrial orbit at certain times, Mairan argued that, when the Earth crosses the solar atmosphere, it must be attracted by it within a certain distance that he evaluated by balancing the gravitational attraction forces of the Earth and the Sun calculated according to Newton’s law. This calculation, physically incorrect because it did not take into account the driving forces related to the rotation of the Earth and the Sun around their common center of gravity, provided a capture distance of 240,000 km, less than the true distance of equilibrium but it allowed Mairan to quantify the distance of interaction necessary for the accretion of solar matter to take place. Mairan’s theory, which borrowed much from Cartesianism by its use of subtle matter, also integrated the idea of Newtonian universal gravity, even if it did not bring any quantitative added value to the theory. Mairan claimed in his treatise his refusal to place himself in a pre-existing current of ideas, ‘because we will try, as much as it will be possible for us, to preserve to our research the advantage to be supported with all the systems by admitting only Observations and facts that can be admitted on both sides’ (p. 30). In the Cartesian conception, the atmosphere of the sun is constituted of a great number of parts of different sizes, which according to Mairan had to be translated by a vertical structuring of the solar matter in the high terrestrial atmosphere, the various solar parts stabilizing at the level of the terrestrial parts of the same density. Mairan, from measurements of parallax of the auroral structures, estimated the height to several hundreds of kilometers, ‘from where it follows, or that the Aurora Borealis consists of a rarer matter, & lighter than the higher parts of our air, some rare & some light & loose that it must be at these great distances, according to the common opinion, or that the Atmosphere is much higher than one believed it until now; which is, according to us, much more probable, & that we hope to prove’ (pp. 6–7). The second hypothesis, which he favored, implied that the atmospheric matter within which the solar matter precipitates is itself subtle, extending far above the coarse matter of the atmosphere which is supposed to reach only about 70 km of altitude on the basis of the estimation method deduced from the duration of twilights. The concept of subtle air, less subtle than ether but more subtle than coarse air, was introduced in the previous century, or at the very beginning of the current century, to explain various phenomena: inequality in the level of mercury in different barometers, suspension of mercury at a great height in inverted tubes, ‘mercurial phosphorus’ (light barometers), considerable degree of adhesion between joined polished planes, these phenomena, with the exception of light barometers, being described in the treatise (pp. 43–51). “Mairan, like Halley, did not discuss the nature of emitted light, this being able to come from the solar matter entering into contact with the subtle air or from the solar light reflected by it. A significant difficulty in his theory was explaining the polar location of the aurora borealis, inherent to Halley’s competing theory. Mairan attributed the concentration of solar matter in the polar regions, where the effect of dispersion by the shocks is minimal, the speed of the atmospheric particles being weak or nil (on the pole), to the scattering of the solar matter, due to the shocks with the particles of the atmosphere endowed with a high linear speed in the equatorial regions. Mairan established in his treatise a complete catalog of the auroras observed for more than a thousand years, and was interested in the fact that the auroras appeared less at certain times than at others. He observed that between 1621 and 1686, no marked aurora was observed, that the resumption in 1686 lasted only a few years and that the phenomenon started to reappear only in 1707, to resume with intensity only from 1716. On a seasonal scale, he tried to demonstrate that the aurora borealis was more frequent when the Earth was close to its perihelion on its orbit around the sun towards the end of December, or when its northern hemisphere pointed in the direction of its speed on its orbit, between the northern summer solstice and the northern winter solstice, the meeting with the solar matter occurring there in a frontal way. He found indeed the expected imbalance, while noting the bias related to the greater duration of twilight towards the summer solstice, which decreased the duration of the dark periods during which, a priori, the aurora was easier to see. Mairan also pointed out a possible link between sunspots and the aurora borealis, an important idea that went unnoticed at the time, and that would not be concretized until a century later by a systematic observation of the link between the two phenomena” (Chassefière, pp. 5-7). “As Newton did at the end of his Opticks, Mairan expresses his thoughts on various subjects in 28 questions in the last section of his book. A number of these questions are related to the atmospheres of comets and the process by which the cometary tails are formed. Being inexplicit about the physical properties of the cometary nuclei, Mairan mainly concentrates on the relationship between the atmospheres of comets and the solar atmosphere. Mairan criticizes Newton’s theory of tail formation from different aspects: He asks why, if the sun’s heat causes the cometary exhalations to ascend, that part of comets which is towards the sun does not expand considerably. He argues that a tail cannot form due to the ascension of the heated ethereal particles and attributes a stronger role to the sun’s rays in driving the particles of the cometary tails. Mairan, then, seeks for the similarities between the tails of comets, aurora and the zodiacal light … “The second edition of Mairan’s book appeared in 1754, after Euler demonstrated mathematically that the solar atmosphere cannot extend as far as the orbit of the earth and proposed his own alternative theory in 1746. Mairan responded to Euler’s criticism immediately (and repeated his responses in the second edition of his book), but he left his theory intact in the new edition of his book. However, by the time of emergence of the electrical theory of cometary tails in the mid-eighteenth century, Marian’s theory remained one of the main non-Newtonian mechanical theories of cometary tails, along with the theories of Euler and Rowning” (Heidarzadeh, pp. 155-156). Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan was born in Béziers on 26 November 1678. He attended college in Toulouse from 1694 to 1697, then went to Paris to study mathematics and physics in 1698. He returned to Béziers in 1702 and began his lifelong study of astronomy and plant rhythms. His observations and experiments are chiefly important for pioneering the study of biological circadian rhythms. He was inducted into the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1748 and co-founded the Académie de Béziers in 1723. He eventually returned to Paris as Secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences from 1740 to 1743 and was given official lodging at the Louvre. He intermittently served as the Académie’s Assistant Director and later Director between 1721 and 1760. He also served as Editor of the important scientific review Journals des Sçavans. Mairan was elected a member of the Russian Academy (1718), a fellow of the Royal Society (1735), and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1769). He was a member of the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh, and Uppsala, and of the Institute of Bologne. He died in Paris on 20 February 1771. Honeyman 2112. Chassefière, Observers of the Aurora Borealis in Europe: Journey into the Learned World of the Enlightenment, 2023. Heidarzadeh, A History of Physical Theories of Comets, 2008. Le Gars, ‘Dortous de Mairan and the Theory of Aurora Borealis: The Trajectory and Circulation of an Idea from 1733 to 1933’, Révue d’Histoire des Sciences 68 (2015), pp. 311-333.
“When the body of a comet approaches the sun it attracts the particles of the solar atmosphere and forms a coma around itself. Then, due to the pressure exerted by the sun’s rays the particles of the coma are driven opposite to the sun and a tail is formed. When the comet moves out of the solar atmosphere it still has enough coma around itself to produce a tail. According to Mairan’s theory, although it is possible that the earth might pass through the coma or the tail of a comet, the consequences would not be cataclysmic. Since the material around the nucleus of a comet is the same as the solar material whose cascade over the earth has created only displays of the Northern Lights, a possible encounter of the earth and the tail of comet will cause not a deluge but a great aurora …
“In spite of the fact that Mairan’s theory was basically a new approach to bringing similar terrestrial, planetary and stellar phenomena under a single umbrella, its technical inconsistencies were too evident to make it a popular theory. One of the main problems in Mairan’s theory (which was discussed by Euler thoroughly) was disregarding the retarding influence of the solar atmosphere on the motions of the interior planets and the earth. Mairan’s limitation of the solar atmosphere to the orbit of the earth implied that no comet could be seen with a noticeable tail before reaching a distance of one astronomical unit from the sun.
4to (252 x 189 mm), pp. viii, 281, with 15 folding engraved plates. Contemporary sprinkled calf, spine gilt in compartments, red morocco label (joints rubbed, short crack to head of rear joint).
Item #6611
Price: $7,500.00
