Milestones of Science Books

WING, Vincent.

Astronomia Britannica: in qua per novam concinnioremq[ue] methodum hi quinq[ue] tractatus traduntur. I. Logistica astronomia . . . II. Trigonometria . . . III. Doctrina sphaerica . . . IV. Theoria planetarum... V. Tabulae novae astronomicae... cui accessit Observationum astronomicarum synopsis compendiaria... additur Postscriptum de refractione.

London: John Macock for George Sawbridge, 1669.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Folio - over 12 - 15" tall. Very Good. Item #001970

Folio (315x200 mm). [20], [2] 3-244, [2]; 192, [2], 193-366, [2], 367-369 [1] pp., including engraved frontispiece portrait of the author, woodcut diagrams, engraved illustration and the blank 3A4. Contemporary panelled calf (extremities worn, spine ends damaged, joints cracked at top and bottom, boards rubbed, corners bumped), gilt morocco spine label, red-sprinkled edges. Some faint dampstaining in upper inner corners at beginning and end, very little occasional spotting and marginal finger- and dust soiling, few scattered rust holes generally not impairing legibility. Provenance: John Reynolds, student of medicine, astronomy, and astrology (early ownership inscription); 19th-century Jesuit stamps (Acole Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, and Maison Saint-Louis, Jersey) on portrait verso and title; the library of the Swiss-American physicist Martin C. Gutzwiller. A fine, clean copy with ample margins. Complete. ----

DSB XIV, p.446; Houzeau & Lancaster 9232; Wing W2986. - First edition. "Like many astronomers in the second half of the seventeenth century, Wing, following Boulliau and Seth Ward, opted for an 'empty-focus' variant of Kepler's second law, holding that a planet moving in an elliptical orbit describes equal angles in equal times about the focus not occupied by the sun. In works published in 1651 and 1656 Wing, adopting Boulliau's method, had his elliptical orbits, including that of the moon, generated in purely geometrical fashion by circles and epicycles.

In his posthumously published Astronomia Britannica, however, he discarded the epicycles in favour of a refined version of the theory proposed by Ward in the latter's Astronomia geometrica (1656), in which the elliptical orbits were assumed to be physically generated. Wing's celestial mechanics contained a mixture of Cartesian and Keplerian components, with a rotating sun and celestial vortex pushing the planets around in their orbits" (DSB XIV, p.446).

Price: 2,800 €  *  convert currency