From the library of a physician and experimentalist
BAKER, Henry. Beyträge zu nützlichem und vergnügendem Gebrauch und Verbesserung des Microscopii: in zwey Theilen … Aus dem Englischen ins Deutsche übersetzt. Augsburg: Eberhard Klett. 1754.
8vo. Contemporary card boards, paper label to spine (half missing); pp. [xx], 576, [16, index], with large folding engraved frontispiece plate, and 16 folding engraved plates at end; woodcut head- and tail-pieces, typographic ornaments; boards somewhat worn, faint browning, small worm hole to inner margin of final gathering (far from printed surface), but generally very good; bookplate of “Joannis Antonii Josephi Scrinci” to verso of title (see below); early ownership inscription to title, deleted in ink with subsequent ink ownership inscription “Ad usum Adamti Voigt Sch. Piar. 1770”; remnant of ?19th-century bookplate to front pastedown.
First German edition of Employment for the Microscope, originally published in English in 1753, with an interesting contemporary provenance.
Henry Baker (1698-1774) won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1744 for his microscopical observations on the crystallization of saline particles, to which much of the first part of this book is devoted. The second part is more concerned with microbiology and includes the first description of dinoflagellates, here called “Animalcules which cause the Sparkling Light in Sea Water”. Baker “had the rare gift of communicating his knowledge of, and above all his enthusiasm for, the microscope to others. This was what made his two books so widely popular” (DSB I, 411).
Provenance: From the library of Johann Anton Joseph (Jan Antonín Josef) Scrinci (1697-1773), a Bohemian physician and university professor of medicine, as well as of experimental chemistry and physics at Prague’s Charles University. Born into an Italian family of master builders, Scrinci gained renown for identifying an outbreak of ergotism in northern Bohemia, a discovery that led to his appointment at Charles University in 1739. As a full professor, he adopted a practical, demonstration-based scientific method in the manner of Boerhaave, making his lectures particularly popular with students. Twice rector of the university, he withdrew from teaching after the Prussian siege of Prague in 1758.
Nissen ZBI 201.
SKU: 2096050