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64 pp; 1 hand-colored colored plate. 4to. Original wrappers, stitched as issued. Signature of former owner on front wrapper. Plate is browned. Vertical blank margin of plate is ragged. Very Good. 1. Pp. 1-35 = First Edition in French of De Ovi Mammalium et Hominis Genesi. Epistolam ad Academiam Imperialem Scientiarum Petropolitanam. Garrison-Morton 477 (citing 1st Latin ed., 1827). "Karl Ernst von Baer's discovery of the mammalian ovum, announced in De ovi mammalium, ended a search that had begun over one hundred and fifty years earlier when William Harvey, in his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651), first proposed the idea that all animals come from eggs. Baer first discovered the mammalian ovum in a dog, and later in other mammals. . . . He published his findings in the form of a letter to the Academy of Sciences at Saint Petersburg. . . . The major significance of his work is summarized in the first of the conclusions to De ovi mammalium . . . Every animal that springs from the coition of male and female is developed from an ovum, and none from a simple formative liquid" (Grolier, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, 59). Grolier, One Hundred Books Famous in Science, 9b. PMM 288a. Heirs of Hippocrates 1493. 2. Pp. 36-61 = First Edition in French of "Commentar zu der Schrift: De Ovi Mammalium et Homini Genesis. Epistola ad Academiam scient. Petropolitanam" (originally published in Zeitschrift für organische Physik, Vol. II, Heft II, February 1828). The Commentar--when its existence is even acknowledged--is sometimes mistakenly described as a German translation of the Latin Epistola. In fact the Commentar is a commentary, correcting mistakes in the Epistola and supplementing it "in so many important respects. Although it is one of the three most important of all of von Baer's publications, the Commentar . . . remains practically unknown and is more difficult of access than the Epistle. It apparently was not even read by writers on the discovery of the ovum and has remained unconsidered even by historians of science" (Meyer, Human Generation, p. 88). In his Autobiography, von Baer wrote of the Commentar: "Worrying that my letter [Epistola] to the Academy had been too concise, I had published a detailed commentary in Heusinger's Zeitschrift für organische Physik, Vol. II (January 1828)" (p. 225 of English translation). In the Commentar itself, von Baer described its relationship to the Epistola as follows: "Such reflections joined with a wish not to extend the writing too much permitted me, even at that time, to conclude to follow my epistle with a commentary which above all things should weigh with a most circumspect exactness the degree of certainty of each statement and compare the egg of mammals with other eggs and at the same time more exactly give the method of investigation and the difficulties which one meets; in order that my representations could be tested and my experiences could be made use of by others. . . . Since it is not here a question of a translation of the earlier writing but to elucidate more fully some things out of the content of the same, so, likewise, it seems unnecessary to follow the order therein. If I here choose a different path, the two treatises will make each other reciprocally better understood" (pp. 92-93 of English translation). OCLC locates copies of the French translation in these US libraries: Chicago, Columbia, NLM, Northwestern. Seller Inventory # 14769
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