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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, J. Cadwell, for J. Crooke, 1661 image 1
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 image 2
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 image 3
Lot 31

BOYLE (ROBERT)
The Sceptical Chymist, FIRST EDITION, J. Cadwell, for J. Crooke, 1661

14 November 2023, 14:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £279,800 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, with the final blank, woodcut ornaments, fore-margins softened with some light damp-stains throughout (with no loss to text, but minor loss of fore-margin at beginning and end, and some old stains touching text to some leaves), contemporary calf, worn and detached from text block [ESTC R37449; Dibner 39; Fulton 33; Norman 299; PMM 141], 8vo (168 x 108mm.), J. Cadwell, for J. Crooke, 1661

Footnotes

RARE FIRST EDITION OF A MILESTONE IN THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY, AND BOYLE'S "MOST FAMOUS BOOK" (ODNB), of which approximately only 35 copies are known.

"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).

Provenance: Private UK collection, given to the owner by his grandfather in the 1970s.

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