Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection

London: Macmillan and Co., 1870

FIRST EDITION. Contains a series of Wallaceʼs essays on the topic of natural selection, some original and some reprinted (including the two papers he published prior to Origin of Species). This is Wallaceʼs first writing on the topic of natural selection with respect to man. His thesis was that natural selection alone cannot explain the evolution of man.

Octavo, recent half-calf over marbled boards. Library stamps on recto and verso of title. A handsome copy.

$1,000

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Varia Opera Mathematica

EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION of Fermat's Collected Works, containing the first publication of most of his work. "Fermat shares with Descartes the innovation of analytical geometry by applying algebra to geometry. He, independently, represented a curve by an equation defining its characteristic properties. He published little but, in the manner of his times, announced his discoveries in letters to other mathematicians. Among his discoveries was a general method of solving questions of maxima and minima, a method he used in 1629 and one in use today. He contributed basic concepts in the theory of numbers and probability. The above [Varia Opera], published after his death, first presented his work and correspondence" (Dibner 108). Provenance: the Inner Temple Library, with small ink stamp on title and a few other leaves; English mathematician Francis Maseres's (1731-1824) copy with his signature on front flyleaf and annotations in text. Folio, contemporary calf rebacked. With five engraved folding plates; engraved head and tailpieces, diagrams in text. Scarce portrait not present, as often. Occasional light browning and foxing. A very good copy.

Price On Request

An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind, Part of Whose Skin Resembles that of a Negro; With some Observations on the Causes of the Differences in Colour and Form Between the White and Negro Races of Men

FIRST EDITION. "The first statement of the theory of natural selection and an almost complete anticipation of Darwin's theory" – Garrison Morton"[What was done for animals artificially] seems to be done with equal efficiency, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit. Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first scattered inhabitants, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the dis- eases of the country. This race would multiply while the others would decrease, and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the [African] climate, at length [they would] be- come the most prevalent, if not the only race."Wells presented “An Account of a Female of the White Race...” to the Royal Society in 1813 but the work was not published until 1818, after his death, as a paper in the volume entitled Two Essays. In this paper, Wells describeshow the natural selection process applies to skin color in humans.Octavo.

$1,200

The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man

SECOND AMERICAN EDITION. Lyell uses the evidence of fossil remains to place the age of the human race in the context of other historical artifacts such as glaciers and extinct species of animals. This was much longer than previously supposed. Lyell also comments on the ideas of species and race, and on the evolution theories of Lamarck, Chambers, Darwin, and Wallace.“Though written by a single author, Antiquity of Man was substantively and symbolically the work of all the human antiquity investigators. It drew extensively on Prestwichʼs and Evansʼs work in the Somme Valley, Pengellyʼs excavation of Brixham Cave, Flaconerʼs investigations of caves throughout Europe, and a variety of recent archaeological stud- ies... His knowledge of post-Tertiary geology and his reputation as theorist meant that, in expressing his belief in men among the mammoths, he tacitly spoke for all the geolo-gists working on the human antiquity question.” - A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men Among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human PrehistoryOctavo. Original pebbled cloth. An attractive copy in original cloth. Generally clean throughout; spine ends frayed with loss, corners rubbed, gilt somewhat dulled. Generally a handsome and sound volume.

$500

Nova Methodus pro maximis et minimis. IN: Acta Eruditorum.

FIRST EDITION of the first announcement of differential calculus. "The controversy with Newton on priority of invention of the calculus does not detract from the superiority of Leibniz' method of notation, one retained in modern use. He applied his new method to the solution of the cubic parabola and the inverse methods of tangents and many problems left unsolved by Descartes. Fifteen years after Newton's first work in fluxions and nine after his own independent discovery, Leibniz published [Nova Methodus], his first announcement of the differential calculus" (Dibner 109). "Leibniz was an almost universal genius whose place in the history of mathematics depends on his being an independent inventor of the infinitesimal calculus and on his contributions to combinatorial analysis which foreshadowed the development of modern mathematical analysis... The Acta Eruditorum was established in imitation of the French Journal des Scavans in Berlin in 1682 and Leibniz was a frequent contributor. Another German mathematician (E.W. Tschirnhausen) having published in it his paper on quadratures, based on researches that Liebniz had communicated to him, Leibniz at last decided in 1684 to present to the world the more abstruse parts of his own work on the calculus. His epoch-making papers give rules of calculation without proof for rates of variation of functions and for drawing tangents to curves... "The infinitesimal calculus originated in the 17th century with the researches of Kepler, Cavalieri, Torrecelli, Fermat and Barrow, but the two independant inventors of the subject, as we understand it today, were Newton and Leibniz... Although both Newton and Leibniz developed similar ideas, Leibniz devised a superior symbolism and his notation is now an essential feature in all presentation of the sibject.... With the calculus a new era began in mathematics, and the development of mathematical physics since the 17th century would not have been possible without the aid of this powerful technique" (PMM 160).IN: Acta Eruditorum, 1684-1685, pp. 467-73. The full volume offered, with volume title, index, and addenda. Thick quarto, contemporary half-calf with elaborately gilt-decorated spine; edges dyed red. Corners on binding bumped and worn. Text generally very clean with only ocassional light browning.

$21,500

Essay on the Theory of the Earth

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. “In paleontology, catastrophism reached an apogee in Georges Cuvierʼs... ʻEssay on the theory of the earth.” Cuvier did not present his Essay as a textbook of catastrophism, but as a statement about the roles that paleontology and geology should play in unravelling the history of the earth. Nonetheless, Cuvierʼs Essay exposes all characteristic features of catastrophism as a science, and illustrates the incompatibility of this geologi- cal approach with Darwinʼs prerequisites for natural selection as a chief agent of macro-evolutionary pattern.” - Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary TheoryOctavo. Complete with half-title and 8 engraved plates. Modern 1/4 calf over early marbled boards. Scattered foxing; glean throughout. A handsome copy.

$700

Studies in the Theory of Descent

FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH of Weismann's Studien zur Descendez-Theorie (1875-1876).Weismann described the seasonal dimorphism of butterflies and then first proposed his theory of the mechanism of heredity. This theory is now called “blastogenesis”. This theory holds that inheritance takes place exclusively through the germ plasm and that none of the other cells of the body pass genetic information to germ cells. This means that the characteristics acquired during life are not transmitted onto the next generation. This is in direct conflict with Lamarckian evolutionary theory and Darinʼs earlier theory of “pangenesis”. Charles Darwin was very supportive of Weismannʼs work and wrote the introduction to this book.Octavo. Two volumes, early half-calf over brown boards.

$600

Television (Seeing by Wire or Wireless)

Dinsdale's Seeing by Wire or Wireless was the first book entirely devoted to subject of television. Dinsdale gives and account of the demonstration of John Baird's successful television system in January 1926, details similar previous experiments, and describes the mechanics of television. Overall, the history of television is well-documented in Dinsdale's work, and Baird's system paved the way for future developments in television, leading to the first high-definition broadcasting system in 1936. First edition. Original wraps, no dust cover; in clamshell box.

$1,700

The Scientific Basis for Evolution

FIRST EDITION.Octavo, original maroon cloth.The Scientific Basis of Evolution documents a series of lectures that Morgan gave at Cornell University in 1931 on the topic of the biology of evolution. A year later, Morgan was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

$125

Two papers confirming the discovery of the Electron: "On the Charge of Electricity carried by the Ions produced by Röntgen Rays" WITH: “On the Masses of the Ions in Gases at Low Pressures"

FIRST EDITIONS OF THOMSON'S PAPERS ON THE DISCOVERY OF THE ELECTRON. The two papers demonstrated the discovery of the electron. In 1897, J. J. Thomson completed measurements of cathode rays and announced on April 30, 1897 that they are comprised of corpuscles with a charge to mass ratio (e/m) roughly one thousand times that of the hydrogen ion. Because he thought that the charge of the corpuscle might be the same as the hydrogen ion measured in electrolysis, he speculated that the mass of the negatively charged corpuscle could be as little as one thousandth of the hydrogen atom. This was printed in the famous paper "Cathode Rays." In the following two years, Thomson conducted additional experiments to determine (rather than just infer) the charge of the corpuscle and improve the precision of his measurements of e/m. He also performed these measurements on corpuscles generated through other mechanisms (e.g., ions created by X-rays) and found that the results were the same regardless of source. In 1899, in the second of these papers, Thomson concluded that the corpuscle was a subatomic particle with a mass 1/1000 of the mass of the hydrogen atom, thus confirming the discovery of the electron. "On the Charge of Electricity carried by the Ions produced by Röntgen Rays" (The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 46 pp. 528-545, 1898) and “On the Masses of the Ions in Gases at Low Pressures,” (The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 48 pp. 547-567, 1899).Two volumes. Quarto. Both volumes beautifully bound in leather and boards. Back of title pages strengthened. Otherwise fine.

$1,500

On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference

FIRST EDITION of Jevons's explanation of his "logical piano"; a landmark in computer science.To the reader of the preceding paper it will be evident that mechanism is capable of replacing for the most part the action of thought required in the performance of logical deduction. Mental agency is required only in interpreting correctly the grammatical structure of the premises, and in gathering the purport of the reply... The machine is thus the embodiment of a true symbolic method or Calculus... Jevons invented a "logical piano" (so named because it resembled a small upright piano) that could perform, through a sequence of switches, various types of logical calculations. In doing so, he became "the first person to construct a machine with sufficient power to solve a complicated problem faster than the problem could be solved without the machine's aid" (Goldstine). "On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference," a paper Jevons read before the Royal Society on January 20, 1870, is his most detailed description of this early prototype of the modern computer. The logical piano now stands in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the year 1870, pp. 497-518, Vol. 160, Part II (the complete volume). London: Taylor and Francis, 1870. Quarto, modern half-calf over marbled boards, with the original wrappers bound-in. A fine copy.

$1,500

The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. In this work, Darwin first proposed his theory of pangenesis as the mechanism of heredity. The theory holds that body cells shed “gemmules” that collect in the reproductive organs, thus transmitting their characteristics to the next generation. Mendelʼs theory of genetics supplanted this theory in the early 1900s. Octavo, two volumes. Original green cloth. Light wear at head of both volumes; light spotting to spine of volume II. Cloth generally clean. An attractive set.

$450

Evidence of Man's Place in Nature

FIRST EDITION (precedes the English edition of the same year). “Huxley wages his struggle [in favor of Darwinʼs theory of evolution] in the pages of his book--in its metaphors and myths, in its rhythms and repetitions, in its images and instructions. ʻThe difference between Man and Ape is less than the difference between Ape and Monkeyʼ--over and over the lesson is repeated, like on of the slogans in the Brave New World of Huxleyʼs grandson Aldous.” –Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution Small 8vo. Original cloth, original spine lablel. Spine ends chipped, spine label and extremities lightly rubbed. Clean throughout. A very attractive copy. Synthesis of the anatomic and embryological evidence of human evolution. Contains a precursor to the “man evolved from apes” theory, noting the resemblance of manʼs skeleton to that of an ape. This predated Darwinʼs Descent of Man by 8 years.

$750

WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSELL