Boyle, Robert

Estimate

2,500 - 3,500 USD

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Description

Medicina hydrostatica: Or, Hydrostaticks Applyed to the Materia Medica. Shewing, How by the Weight That Divers Bodies, Us’d in Physick, Have in Water... London: Printed for Samuel Smith, 1690
paper, ink, leather

8vo (6 1/4 x 3 1/2 in.; 159 x 89 mm). Half-title, A1 cancelled and replaced with pi² (engraved frontispiece and title within double-ruled border), errata (b4v); text browning in quire P and the catalogue. Eighteenth-century speckled calf, gilt-ruled border, spine lettered gilt; spine and joints lightly rubbed.

Provenance

Joh[ann]is Rogers (signature on verso of front free endpaper)

Literature

Medicina hydrostatica: Wing B3988; ESTC R17502; Fulton 189. Catalogue: Wing B3928A

Catalogue Note

First edition of "the first tract in English upon the determination of specific gravity" (Fulton). Boyle provides directions for determining it, along with the means, as illustrated in the engraved frontispiece of weighing scales and other apparatus. An appended table gives the specific gravity of a range of materials such as ivory, rhinocerous horn, metals, and the like. The postscript informs the reader of a projected second volume, which apparently never came to fruition.