Sylva sylvarum. (bound with) New Atlantis

London: John Haviland for William Lee, 1635. FIFTH EDITION. Complete with frontispiece portrait of the author and the uncommon second engraved title, the tables and the recipe for gout in the first work, woodcut vignette on the title page of New Atlantis. Contemporary calf, rebacked; an excellent copy. Fifth edition of Bacon’s collection of exceedingly significant scientific experiments and observations on natural history, published posthumously by his personal chaplain, William Rawley. It was in this work that Bacon strove to separate his views of natural history from those of his contemporaries by building on a notion of the “new science” rather than collecting pleasant pictures and descriptions. The second work is Bacon’s highly acclaimed, yet unfinished, utopian novel, New Atlantis, which details the customs, people, society, and history of the fictitious island of Bensalem and the Salomon House, their cooperative college of science. The “new science” described in this work, along with Bacon’s other writings, was so influential that it eventually contributed to the formation of the Royal Society (DSB, I, p. 376 and generally pp. 372-377).

Bacon (1561-1626) was an English statesman, natural philosopher, and advocate of the inductive method in science. Ahead of his time, Bacon conceived a new means of acquiring true knowledge by observation, experiment and inductive reasoning. His new experimental method was to encompass an account of the current knowledge of the world with the new instruments where everyone would be capable of engaging in scientific investigation for the betterment of humankind. Although his personality was unattractive, his views of scientific methods were influential.

Gibson, 174; STC, 1172.