Beschreibung
De Gemmis: Leiden: Johannes Maire, 1647. First edition. Isagoge: Strasbourg, Caspar Dietzel, 1631. Octavo (7" x 4 1/4", 177mm x 107mm): pp. [64], 212, [6]; [6], 176, [10]. With in excess of 40 woodcut illustrations. Bound in contemporary stabbed vellum with yapp edges. Authors and title in ink manuscript to the title. All edges of the text-block sprinkled red. Binding lightly soiled, mild browning, small tears and restorations, else very good. With an ink signature (M. Gregorij Mußaelij?) dated 1649 as well as small red wax seal with an armorial impression to the title-page. A XIXc ink-stamp with initials "RB" to the verso of the title-page. Joannes de Laet (1581-1649), a Dutch geographer and director of the Dutch West India Company, is best known for his History of the New World, first published in Dutch in 1625 and subsequently issued in Latin and French editions with updated maps. Towards the end of his life de Laet wrote this work on gems and precious stones. He divides his book into two parts, the first describing the "pellucid and semi-pellucid"(i.e., transparent and semi-transparent) gemstones, while the second describes the "figured" stones that naturally appear shaped in curious and unusual forms (e.g., fossils, corals, geodes, enhydros, asbestos, pumice, etc.). A 48-page Greek-to-Latin interlinear translation of Theophrastus's short treatise, On Stones (De lapidibus, Peri Lithon), with annotations by de Laet, serves as an introduction to the entire work. In the present volume, de Laet's treatise is followed by August Etzler's Isagoge physico-magico-medica (first edn. 1610). Etzler's work emphasizes the doctrine of signatures in plants and animals, relations of sympathy and antipathy, and the rule of superior celestial over inferior terrestrial bodies. A chapter is devoted to each planet and the plants, animals, human types, places, metals and diseases related to it. De Laet: F.D. Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (1938), p. 163; and John Sinkankas, Gemology: An Annotated Bibliography (1993), no. 3747. Etzler: Duveen 199; Krivatsy 3735; Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library (2006) I.430; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1958) VII.134-135; Wellcome I.2076. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers JLR0250
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