Rebound in clothbacked boards with printed paper label on front cover. Original front wrapper bound in
1900 · London:
by Petrus Peregrinus [ e Maricourt]
London: Bernard Quaritch, 1900 One of 50 copies. Rebound in clothbacked boards with printed paper label on front cover. Original front wrapper bound in. Quarto. A very good copy. Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt (fl. 1269), was a thirteenth-century French scholar who conducted experiments on magnetism and wrote the first extant treatise describing the properties of magnets. His treatise contained the first detailed discussion of freely pivoting compass needles, a fundamental component of the dry compass soon to appear in medieval navigation. It directly influenced William Gilbert (1544-1603) in his work, De Magnete (1600),"the first major English scientific treatise based on experimental methods of research" (Printing and the Mind of Man, 107). Gilbert's book in turn influenced Kepler, Bacon, Boyle, Newton and Galileo.
(Inventory #: 16478)