Animadversions on the first part of the Machina Coelestis of the honourable, learned, and deservedly famous astronomer Johannes Hevelius Consul of Dantzick; together with an explication of some instru

$4,250 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Robert Hooke (1635-1703) Year: 1674 Publisher: Printed by T[homas] R[oycroft] for John Martyn Place: London Description: [viii]+78+[2 blank] pages with three folding 3ngraved plates. Quarto (9 1/4" x 7") stab sewn and untrimmed throughout, with deckle edges, mostly unopened housed in custom clamshell box. (Wing H-2611; ESTC R38964) First edition. Hooke counted devices [described in the present volume] among his greatest mechanical achievements. [...] What distinguished Hooke's instruments, indeed, was the fact that they were 'convenient and manageable,' together with the real advances they made. [...] The most spectacular of Hooke's complex scientific instruments, his equatorial quadrant, is described in detail -- with a glorious illustration -- in his Animadversions (the book in which he publicly attacked Hevelius's rejection of instrumental aids for astronomy.) [...] An equatorial quadrant allows the observer to follow the motion of a heavenly body by pushing his instrument around the axis: 'but Hooke goes further and has a machine do the pushing.'" (Quoted from Lisa Jardine's The Curious Life of Robert Hooke , London: Harper Collins, 2003, page 44ff.) Robert Hooke was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverishe

• Binding: Hardcover

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