First quarto edition in English. Edited by Thomas Birch, whose extensive Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle occupies the opening 218 pages of volume I and is followed by an appendix of documents, among them the charter of the New England Company, Boyle’s will, and letters on his Irish Bible and its distribution in the Highlands of Scotland. Volume I also holds his replies to Linus and to Thomas Hobbes’s Dialogus physicus de natura aeris, and volume IV his alchemical tract Of a Degradation of Gold. The 1772 edition follows the first collected edition of 1744, issued in folio, and is the second collected edition in English.
Six volumes, quarto (approximately 292 × 229 mm). Engraved portrait frontispiece by Bernard Baron after Johann Kerseboom, signed in the plate, and sixteen engraved plate leaves, most of them folding, carrying twenty-four subjects. Plates engraved by J. Mynde; title-page vignettes and other illustrations engraved by Hubert-François Gravelot. In our assessment, uniform contemporary full calf, raised bands and black morocco lettering-pieces.
Fine. Excellent preservation; a beautiful copy, internally fine. Complete as issued, including all text and illustrations. The contents are nearly spotless, with minuscule exceptions; frontispiece with very light spotting, minor soiling and toning. Uniform calf, contemporary in our assessment, neither rebacked nor rebound; hinges reinforced, rubbing, and wear resulting in minor losses along edges. No restoration beyond the reinforced hinges. Booksellers’ pencil notes on the front endpapers, including a collation note (“Complete … 6 vols. Portr & 24 plates … Fulton 241”), stock codes and an early price; ink pen trials on one pastedown. An imposing, complete set in its original contemporary bindings.
Collation: I: [2], ccxxxviii, 799, [1] pages; II: [2], 800 pages; III: [2], 803, [1] pages; IV: [2], 424, 445–644, 745–821, [1] pages; V: [2], 750 pages; VI: [2], 796, [130] pages. The discontinuities in the pagination of volume IV are recorded features of the edition and involve no loss of text. The set is complete as issued, including its text and illustrations.
The six volumes gather the works through which Boyle helped define experimental natural philosophy. They include his writings on the spring and weight of the air, the vacuum and pneumatic experiments; The Sceptical Chymist; studies of colour, cold, combustion, respiration, medicine and natural history; and the theological works through which he joined the investigation of nature to religious belief. A general table of contents appears in volume I and a substantial general index concludes volume VI.
Robert Boyle was born at Lismore Castle in Munster, the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, and was educated by private tutors at home and on the Continent. In the last years of the English Civil Wars he lived at Oxford, reading and experimenting with assistants and colleagues devoted to the New Philosophy, which held that observation and experiment counted for no less than reasoning in establishing reliable knowledge of nature (Science History Institute). John Wilkins, John Wallis and Thomas Willis belonged to the same Oxford circle, and there in 1656 Boyle and Christopher Wren made the first attempts to inject drugs into the veins of animals (PMM 149). When the monarchy was restored in 1660 he was among those most instrumental in founding the Royal Society. Henry Oldenburg, its first secretary and the founder of the Philosophical Transactions, had entered the scientific life of Europe through his connection with Boyle (PMM 148). Boyle was also Governor of the New England Company, the first English missionary society, whose charter he had renewed at the Restoration and which paid for John Eliot’s translation of the Bible into the Algonquian language of the Massachusett people (PMM 142). His moral essays, Occasional Reflections (1665), are dedicated to his sister, Lady Ranelagh (Science History Institute).
Chemistry was Boyle’s chief scientific interest, yet his most enduring results came from experimental physics (Science History Institute; PMM 141). On hearing in 1657 of Otto von Guericke’s air pump, he set his assistants to build one, and Robert Hooke built another (PMM 143). His first scientific book, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects (1660), reported forty-three experiments made with them (Martin 2012). They showed that sound does not travel through a vacuum, that the weight of the air holds up the mercury in a barometer, and that air is elastic and necessary to respiration and combustion, while light and magnetism pass without it (PMM 143). The word “barometer” was probably Boyle’s own coinage (PMM 145). The second edition of 1662 added a defence of his views against Thomas Hobbes and others, and an appendix setting out what Boyle called a “hypothesis” and we call Boyle’s law, that the volume of a confined body of air varies inversely with the pressure (PMM 143). The compression experiments behind it trapped air in the sealed short arm of a J-shaped glass tube, compressed it by pouring in mercury, and read its pressure from the height of the mercury column; experiments in rarefaction by others, Hooke among them, completed the evidence (Martin 2012; PMM 143). The appendix printed the results as a table whose two columns show pressure and volume varying inversely. Boyle invited his readers to compare the columns and never stated the rule outright. Edme Mariotte published the same relation independently in 1676, adding that it holds only at constant temperature, and in France it still bears his name (Martin 2012).
Boyle’s theory of matter was corpuscularian. Aristotelians explained the world through substance, form and the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, and Paracelsians through salt, sulphur and mercury. The corpuscular philosophy, which was gradually supplanting both, described reality and change “in terms of particles and their motion” (Science History Institute). Boyle held that chemical experiment could demonstrate its truth. He opposed the doctrine of a few basic elements all his life, arguing that matter consists of particles of many shapes and sizes, which group together into chemical substances far more numerous than four, and he separated mixtures from compounds (PMM 141). In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) he defined elements as “certain primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies,” from which all mixed bodies are compounded and into which they are finally resolved. He probably meant the uniform and still unobserved corpuscles that make up larger aggregates. Lavoisier and his contemporaries later used the word in another sense, for a substance that chemical methods could break down no further. His corpuscular theory, in the form Newton gave it, moved chemists by degrees towards the atomic view of matter that Dalton established, and the book has long been counted among the steps towards Lavoisier’s chemical revolution (PMM 141). Among Boyle’s many observations was the gain in weight of metals heated into calxes, which he ascribed to fiery particles passing through the walls of the glass vessel (Science History Institute). In the eighteenth century that same gain in weight became a serious obstacle to the phlogiston theory (PMM 217).
Nothing in this theory of matter ruled out the transmutation of base metals into gold. Boyle studied the alchemist J. B. van Helmont closely and adopted many of his ideas (PMM 135). He practised alchemy to the end of his life, believed that he had witnessed a transmutation, and successfully lobbied Parliament to repeal England’s ban on it (Science History Institute). Nineteenth-century chemists read the word “alchymists” in the subtitle of The Sceptical Chymist as a renunciation of alchemy. In Boyle’s lifetime the words chemistry and alchemy were virtually interchangeable. Lawrence Principe’s research of the late 1990s showed that Boyle aimed his criticism at the common run of alchemists while he pursued the secret of transmutation himself (Voelkel 2012).
Boyle’s curiosity reached into Scotland. On 3 October 1678 he questioned George MacKenzie, Lord Tarbat, about the Highland faculty of second sight, a thing he described as “not to be matched in the books of Magick.” Tarbat’s follow-up letter to Boyle circulated in manuscript through the 1690s and set off two decades of English and Scottish inquiry into the subject. Boyle hoped that soberly verified reports of this kind would answer the sceptics of his day, and his alchemy, which reached its peak in the same years with Of a Degradation of Gold by an Anti-Elixir (1678), served the same end. He also paid for the Gaelic Bible, printed first for Ireland and then, in a Roman-letter version prepared by the minister Robert Kirk, for the Highlands, where copies reached the parishes in the 1690s (Hunter 2001). The letters on that Highland distribution, with James Kirkwood’s account of Boyle’s part in it, are printed in the appendix to the Life in volume I.
Boyle’s lasting importance lies in the methods by which experimental knowledge was made credible. His carefully narrated experiments allowed readers who had not witnessed an event to follow its apparatus, circumstances and outcome—a form of “virtual witnessing” that made the printed book itself part of the new experimental culture. In this respect the collected Works preserve the literary and visual technology through which Boyle’s experimental facts circulated.
Modern scholarship has also replaced the simple textbook image of Boyle as the isolated “father of modern chemistry.” His investigations belonged simultaneously to natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy and theology, and in his writings on natural theology he argued that God created the universe according to definite laws. The collection therefore records the gradual transformation of older traditions within the experimental practices of the Scientific Revolution.
Provenance
Dunse Library, with its bookplates in each volume — the subscription library of Dunse (present-day Duns, Berwickshire), founded by subscribers in 1768, whose Record of the Laws, Regulations, and Proceedings of the Subscribers for a Public Library at Dunse, 1768–1850 survives in the Scottish Borders Archive (DL/3/1). At the foundation, the library’s patron Alexander Hay of Drummelzier — once a student of the philosopher Andrew Baxter — recorded his pleasure “to think that Dunse is in a way of becoming a seat of literature, arts and sciences” (proceedings, 7 December 1768). The institution issued printed catalogues in 1780 and 1793, the latter from the press of James Brown, first printer at Duns; its proprietors appear as “frequent customers” in the ledgers of the Edinburgh booksellers Bell & Bradfute; and the letters of Dr J. Hall of the Dunse Library survive with the library’s orders and accounts, one of 2 May 1787 requesting the newest books of the day, among them the second edition of Burns’s Poems. The present set entered the collection after the 1780 catalogue was printed — Boyle’s collected Works among the literature, arts and sciences of a proprietary library that bought its books from the heart of the Edinburgh trade. The engraved Dunse Library label sits on the original pastedown of each volume.
Literature
Fulton, A Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle, second edition (1961), no. 241; ESTC T113550; Blake, p. 62; Wellcome Catalogue II, p. 225; Hunter & Davis, eds., The Works of Robert Boyle (1999–2000); Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (2009); Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985); Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (1998); Hunter, The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 1–12; Carter & Muir, eds., Printing and the Mind of Man, nos. 135, 141–143, 145, 148, 149, 217 (first editions of the separate works); Science History Institute, “Robert Boyle,” Scientific Biographies (sciencehistory.org); C. Martin, “Full Boyle,” Distillations (Science History Institute, 2012); J. R. Voelkel, “Alchemists, Unite!,” Distillations (Science History Institute, 2012); Brown & McDougall, eds., The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, II: Enlightenment and Expansion 1707–1800 (Edinburgh, 2012); Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment (doctoral thesis, University of St Andrews); Duns Proceedings, Scottish Borders Archive, DL/3/1.
Boyle’s experimental world in six volumes—the first quarto edition, complete with its engraved apparatus, from the library through which Dunse hoped to become “a seat of literature, arts and sciences.”
Atelier Zweig · L398
