Milestones of Science Books

HARRSCH AND ALMEDINGEN, Ferdinand Ludwig von.

Pyrotechnia sublimis saeculi primaevi, vel Liber meteororum.

Vienna: Johann Thomas von Trattner, 1778.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002740

4to (237 x 190 mm). [18], 131 [1] pp., including engraved folding frontispiece, engraved title vignette, typographical headpieces and initials, and 2 engraved folding plates by Engelmann after Harrsch. Bound in fine contemporary marbled calf, plain spine with richly gilt floral decoaration and gilt-lettered label (hinges repaired, extremities rubbed, boards little soiled and scatched), red-dyed edges, marbled endpapers. Internally quite crisp and clean with only little occasional spotting and marginal browning. Provenances: Étienne-François Dutour de Salvert, naturalist and physicist (1711-1789), author of Recherches sur la théorie de l'électricité (his ink inscription and signature on title-page); Geysmer (red ink stamp on title page). A fine copy of a rare work. ----

FIRST EDITION. An attractive but little-known work by Count Ferdinand Ludwig von Harrsch und Almedingen on the origin of metals, minerals, and gems, including meteorites, with a discussion of meteorological phenomena, earthquakes, aurora borealis and volcanoes. The book is dedicated to the members of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg and the result of his 20 years of studies. In it, he denigrates the pseudochemists and their imaginary making of gold, but on the other hand refers to the works of great alchemists such as Van Helmont, D. Zecaire or even Roger Bacon. His theory of electric vapor appears as a relining of the alchemical doctrine of the universal spirit of the world, and it is this mineral-electric vapor which according to him designated the ancients under the myth of 'Demogorgon' (Sylvain Matton, La figure de Démogorgon dans la littérature alchimique. In: Alchimie: art, histoire et mythes, Paris-Milan, 1995, p. 343). The work is illustrated with 3 large folding plates engraved on copper by Engelman based on compositions by the author. The last two represent diagrams, but the first, placed as frontispiece, shows "the eternal circulation of electric vapor between the two poles of the underground Demogorgon, father of the meteors, and of the celestial sun, with Fludd's two favorite hermetic sentences, That of the Emerald Table: "That which is above is as that which is below," and that of the Book of the Twenty-Fourth Philosophers: "The Monad begot the Monad and reflected on its own ardor." (Sylvain Matton, ibid).

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