An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype

London: R. Dodsley, 1743. First edition.

RUSHED INTO PRESS A YEAR BEFORE TREMBLEY'S MEMOIRES ON REGENERATION BY HYDRA, THIS VOLUME SHARED IN THE BIRTH OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY.

19.5 x 12 cm hardcover, recent leather spine with gilt title and compartments, marbled paper covers, new endpapers, engraved frontispiece of life size and magnified hydra, 218 pp, many wood engravings throughout text, [4], 2 pp publisher's list including Baker's The Microscope Made Easy. Very good in custom archival mylar cover.

THE FULL TITLE: "An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype: In a Letter to MARTIN FOLKES, Esq; President of the Royal Society. Describing Their different Species; the Places where to seek and how to find them; their wonderful Production and Increase; the Form, Structure, and Use of their several Parts; and the Manner they catch their Prey. With an account of their DISEASES and CURES; of their amazing REPRODUCTION after being cut in pieces (as first discovered by Mr. TREMBLEY, at the Hague;) of the best Methods to perform that Operation and of the Time requsite to perfect the several parts after being divided. And Also full DIRECTIONS how to feed, clean, manage and preserve them at all Seasons of the Year. Likewise a COURSE of real EXPERIMENTS performed by the cutting of these creatures in every way that can be easily contrived: shewing the daily progress of each part towards becoming a perfect POLYPE. The Whole explained every where by a great Number of proper Figures and intermixed throughout with variety of OBSERVATIONS and EXPERIMENTS."

GARRISON-MORTON No. 306.

HENRY BAKER (1698 – 1774) was a British naturalist who contributed many memoirs to the Transactions of the Royal Society. Among his publications were A Short History of Speech (1723), The Microscope made Easy (1743), Employment for the Microscope (1753), where he noted down the presence of dinoflagellates for the first time as "Animalcules which cause the Sparkling Light in Sea Water", and several volumes of verse, original and translated, including The Universe, a Poem intended to restrain the Pride of Man (1727). In 1744, Baker was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal of the Royal Society. His bequest of one hundred pounds established the oration to the Royal Society known as the Bakerian Lecture. Baker's interest in polyps began when Royal Society president, Martin Folkes, shared some of the polyps sent to him by Trembley (for the verification of Trembley's reported experiments) with members of the Society. "Using these and some hydra found locally. Baker repeated many of Trembley's experiments and pursued a number of interesting observations on his own. In 1743 he rushed into print a volume several hundred pages long in the form of an extended letter to Folkes, which contained both his own and some of Trembley's results." (Lenhoff and Lenhoff, Hydra and the birth of experimental biology, 1986, p.6).