Sold by Brainerd Phillipson Rare Books, Holliston, MA, U.S.A.
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AbeBooks Seller since 10 June 1998
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Bound in heavy black cloth boards stamped in gilt along the spine, a total of 99 pages with "Finis" followed by an original endpaper. An ex-library book with "No longer the property of Haverford College" stamped over the library sticker from the Physics Laboratory, The Library of Haverford College on the front pastedown. With an engraved title page, featuring the Sheldonian House in Oxford. Numerous woodcut diagrams of optics and angles as well as several full-page plates and illustrations throughout the text. Printed on high quality white paper with a high rag content. The title page has the previous owner's name in ink: Nathan Wrighte of Englefield No. 239 in addition to the dime-sized library stamp, the only indication of ex-library in the actual text. A clean, handsome copy of this rather scarce work on optics, a splendid candidate for rebinding in leather. First edition of this rare work, famous today for its suggestion that an achromatic compound lens might be formed by combining simples lenses of different media. The use of achromatic doublets was a crucial step in the further development of telescopes and microscopes. From Marischal College, Aberdeen, David Gregory (1659-1708) entered Edinburgh University, graduating M.A. on 28 November 1683. A month prior to his graduation he was elected to the Chair of Mathematics, at one time occupied by his uncle, the great mathematician James Gregory, whose Optica promota (1663) had described a reflecting telescope which used parabolic mirrors. As a professor, David Gregory was the first to lecture publicly on the Newtonian philosophy. His lecture notes show that they covered a broad range of subjects including geodesy, optics, dynamics, and various branches of mathematics. Increasingly under attack by his fellow professors at Edinburgh for his radical political views, in 1691 he went to London where he was introduced to Newton and recommended to John Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal. As Gregory tells us in the preface, the present work is the printed version of lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1684, adapted to the teaching of Oxford undergraduates. The passage in which Gregory uses the analogy with the human eye to suggest the construction of an achromatic lens occurs on p. 98: in English translation, Perhaps it would be of service to make the object lens of a different medium, as we see done in the fabric of the eye; where the crystalline humour (whose power of refracting the rays of light differs very little from that of glass) is by Nature, who never does anything in vain, joined with the aqueous and vitreous humours (not differing from water as to their power of refraction), in order that the image may be painted as distinct as possible on the bottom of the eye. Whiteside (DSB) suggests that Gregory may have had this insight from Newton. (Sophia Rare Books) First Edition with matching dates of 1695 on the title and copyright pages and with "Apr. 18, 1695" on the copyright page.
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