Newton, Isaac

Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. Also Two Treatises of the Species and Magnitude of Curvilinear Figures. London: Printed for Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1704



4to (9 x 6 7/8 in.; 228 x 175 mm). Title printed in red and black, 19 folding engraved diagrams; title soiled, library stamps on title, on every 4-5 leaves and on every diagram, the diagrams keyed to page numbers in ink in an early hand. Modern green buckram, blindstamped supralibros on lower cover.

Newcastle upon Tyne, Scientific & Mechanical Institution, and City Library (library stamps and supralibros, deaccessioned in 1977)

Babson 132 (mistakenly calling for a 2C signature); Dibner 148; Grolier/Horblit 79b; Norman 1588; PMM 172; Sparrow, Milestones 150; Wallis 174

title soiled, library stamps on title, on every 4-5 leaves and on every diagram, the diagrams keyed to page numbers in ink in an early hand. Modern green buckram, blindstamped supralibros on lower cover.
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First edition, one of the author's few published works in English. The Opticks summarizes an astounding number of Newtonian discoveries and theories concerning such topics as the color circle, the spectrum of sunlight, the reflecting telescope, rainbows, and degrees of refraction. He opens his study with the sentence: "My design in this book is not to explain properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments."

Because of this attitude, the Opticks remained for over a century "a work of great authority; 'supreme' in Andrade's words 'as a record of experiment and scientific deduction from experiment'" (PMM).