INSCRIBED. On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man, Principally with Reference to the Supply of His Wants, and the Exercise of his Intellectual Faculties [Second Bridgewater Treatise]

London: William Pickering, 1833. First edition.

1833 FIRST EDITION OF ARGUMENT BY OXFORD PHYSICIAN THAT MAN'S EARTHLY ENVIRONMENT IS ADAPTED TO HIS USE--INSCRIBED TO LORD ASTON.

14x23 cm hardcover, blue cloth binding, rebacked with recent paper title label to spine, new endpapers. 8 pp publisher's advertisements dated March, 1833, blank page containing author's ink inscription, "For the Right Honble & Reverend Lord Aston, from his sincere friend, the Author," i-xvi (dedication to the Archbishop of Canterbury, description of the Bridgewater Treatises, table of contents, 375 pp, Appendix (Aristotle and Cuvier compared). Bookplate of Phillips University Library to front paste-down, handstamp of K N McCash to front paste-down and bottom of title page, light scattered foxing, very good in custom archival mylar cover.

JOHN KIDD (1775 –1851) was an English physician, chemist and geologist who took a leading role in Oxford's "scientific awakening" in the early years of the nineteenth century. He became reader in chemistry at Oxford in 1801, and in 1803 was elected the first Aldrichian Professor of Chemistry. He then voluntarily gave courses of lectures on mineralogy and geology. These were delivered in the dark chambers under the Ashmolean Museum, where William Conybeare, William Buckland, Charles Daubeny and others gained their first lessons in geology. Kidd was a popular and instructive lecturer, and through his efforts the geological chair, first held by Buckland, was established. In 1818 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians; in 1822 Regius Professor of Medicine in succession to Sir Christopher Pegge; and in 1834 he was appointed keeper of the Radcliffe Library. In March 1822 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1830 the president of the Royal Society appointed him as one of the eight authors of the Bridgewater Treatises "on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation." His treatise on the "Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man" which was published in 1833, offered "a popular rather than a scientific exposition of facts" and set out to protect readers from materialism and the transmutation of species.

PROVENANCE: WALTER ASTON, 9TH LORD ASTON OF FORFAR (1769 –1845) was a son of Walter Aston, 8th Lord Aston of Forfar, and Anne Hutchinson. He was an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, and became the Vicar of Tardebigge, Worcestershire and Tamworth, Warwickshire. In 1805, he succeeded his father as Lord Aston of Forfar in the peerage of Scotland.