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Lot 236•
BOYLE (ROBERT) The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, touching the Spagyrist's Principles commonly call'd Hypostatical, as they are wont to be Propos'd and Defended by the Generality of Alchymists, FIRST EDITION, J. Cadwell, for J. Crooke, 1661
25 March 2015, 11:00 GMT
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £362,500 inc. premium
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BOYLE (ROBERT)
The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, touching the Spagyrist's Principles commonly call'd Hypostatical, as they are wont to be Propos'd and Defended by the Generality of Alchymists, FIRST EDITION, 2 titles printed in red and black (the second additional, bound after D1), R2 a cancel, without final blank, A2-3 with small paper flaw at head just touching headline, second title with author's name added in ink and with small tear repaired with old paper on blank verso, short tear touching 2 lines of D2, collector's mark touching 2 letters on p.51, but generally very clean and crisp, contemporary sheep, some refurbishment to spine, leaves from a Latin edition of Aristotle used as free endpapers, fragments (160 x 90mm.) of a fourteenth century vellum manuscript as paste-downs, preserved in modern solander box [Wing B4021; Dibner 39; Fulton 33; Norman 299; PMM 141], 8vo (167 x 99mm.), J. Cadwell, for J. Crooke, 1661
Footnotes
FINE FIRST EDITION OF A MILESTONE IN THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY, AND BOYLE'S "MOST FAMOUS BOOK" (ODNB).
"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... 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 transmuting one metal into another or the manufacture of drugs. In this sense the book must be considered one of the most significant milestones on the way to the chemical revolution of Lavoisier in the eighteenth century" (PMM).