Fatio de Duillier, Nicolas

Estimate

1,200 - 1,800 USD

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Description

Fruit-walls Improved, by Inclining Them to the Horizon: Or, A Way to Build Walls for Fruit-Trees; Whereby They May Receive More Sun Shine, and Heat, than Ordinary. London: Printed by R. Everingham; and Are To Be Sold by John Taylor, 1699
Paper, Ink, Leather

4to (8 3/4 x 7 in.; 222 x 178 mm). Engraved allegorical frontispiece, 2 engraved folding plates, engraved historiated initials and head- and tailpieces, all by Simon Gribelin, engraved emblem on title-page, imprimatur of the Royal Society on verso of title-page, numerous tables; light discoloration to frontispiece and title-page and folding plate opposite A1, error in register after quire A (signed C–R) but retaining correct pagination. Nineteenth-century half calf over marbled boards, red speckled edges; rebacked.

Literature

Wing F557; ESTC R5191; An Oak Spring Pomona, 15; Pritzel 2820

Catalogue Note

First edition. Fatio de Duillier was a Swiss mathematician who was elected to the Royal Society in 1688, and whose imprimatur this treatise bears. Fatio de Duillier proposed an increase in espalier fruits and vine productivity by the use of sloping walls and later a tracking mechanism which could pivot to follow the sun. However, pomological specialists John Laurence and Stephen Switzer both dismissed Fatio de Duillier's theory as it was not initially supported by practical trials. Switzer later archly remarked in his work, The Practical Fruit-Gardener (1731), that "those walls [at Belvoir Castle] after all their Expense, were useless till assisted by artificial heat."