Second unabridged collected edition in English and the first unabridged collected edition in quarto. Edited by Thomas Birch, whose extensive Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle occupies the opening 218 pages of volume I. The 1772 edition follows the first unabridged collected edition of 1744, issued in folio; it should not be confused with Peter Shaw’s abridged three-volume collection of 1738.

Six volumes, quarto (approximately 292 × 229 mm). Engraved portrait frontispiece and sixteen engraved plate leaves, some folding, carrying twenty-four subjects. Plates engraved by J. Mynde; title-page vignettes and other illustrations engraved by Hubert-François Gravelot. Uniform old full calf, raised bands and black morocco lettering-pieces.

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, not evidence of missing 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: 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.

Boyle’s importance lies not only in the pressure–volume relationship that bears his name, but 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 are not merely a retrospective monument: they 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. The collection therefore records not the sudden disappearance of older traditions, but their transformation 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.

Condition

Very good. Complete as issued, including all text, the portrait and the engraved plates. Some light spotting, minor soiling and toning; the portrait frontispiece very lightly spotted. Uniform old full calf, the precise date of the bindings not established; hinges reinforced, leather rubbed, with wear and small losses at the spine ends, corners and board edges. An imposing, complete set in honestly preserved bindings of considerable age, with the reinforcement and wear fully disclosed.

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); 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 unabridged 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