The two folding engraved plates are the best thing in this book. They are little galleries of the invisible made visible. On the first, among the pulleys and pistons, are the whiskered portraits of magnetic force: iron filings strewn around magnets and drawn exactly as they fall, bristling along the lines of a field no eye can see. Faraday would teach physics to take such pictures seriously as "lines of force" decades later. The second plate is busier. A U-magnet hangs its keeper, charged columns stack their plus and minus signs, furnaces drive vapors through coiled tubes. Best of all, a village church raises its onion-domed steeple fitted with a lightning conductor, the century's emblem of heaven's fire brought to heel. Both plates are signed simply "Zu Prof. Weber Dynamik der Materie" — for Professor Weber's Dynamics of Matter.
Joseph von Weber (1753–1831) was one of the great figures of the Catholic Enlightenment in Bavaria. He was a priest of the diocese of Augsburg and professor of physics and chemistry at Dillingen, Ingolstadt and Landshut. He was also a working experimentalist, who invented an air electrophorus in his twenties. The Leopoldina, the German academy of natural scientists, elected him in the very year this book appeared. The Bavarian crown knighted him later on and he was made vicar general of Augsburg, where a memorial stone in the cathedral still commemorates him.
His science ran in the dynamical tradition descended from Kant. Matter, on this account, is a living equilibrium of attractive and repulsive forces — nature as activity all the way down. Hence the splendid title: the science of material nature, or the Dynamics of Matter. Weber also wrote a treatise on animal magnetism as "the secret of human life," so the era's most fashionable occult science was well within his range.
The errata leaf repays a look. Headed "Revision," it corrects the text's discussion of the cause of magnetism, and pauses over one of the "daring hypotheses" then in circulation. Professor Steinhäuser of Halle had proposed that the magnetic mystery is the work of Minerva, a subordinate planet circling the center of the Earth at one-fifth of the Earth's radius, deep beneath our feet, once every 440 years. A whole planet inside the Earth, reported soberly in a list of corrections. Romantic science in one paragraph.
This copy sits in its original plain paper boards, soiled and rubbed and never restored. It went to the Capuchin friars of Mariabuchen, a Franconian pilgrimage cloister. The cloister's miraculous image, a Madonna in a beech tree, appears in the violet library stamp on the title. The friars' printed booklabel, shelved under "Naturwissenschaft," faces it inside the cover. Both folding plates are present, as called for.
Provenance: Library of the Capuchin friary at Mariabuchen, Franconia (pilgrimage cloister near Lohr am Main): violet pictorial inkstamp ("Klosterbibliothek Mariabuchen," with the Madonna in the beech tree) to the title, printed booklabel ("Bibliothek der Kapuziner Mariabuchen," shelfmark "Naturw. 14" in ink) to the front pastedown, matching spine label.
WEBER, Joseph von (1753-1831). Wissenschaft der materiellen Natur oder Dynamik der Materie. Munich: J. J. Lentner; Leipzig: Hartmann, 1821. First edition.
Physical Description: Octavo. With two folding engraved plates ("Mit zwei Kupfertafeln," Tafel I-II, signed "Zu Prof. Weber Dynamik der Materie"), depicting mechanics, electrostatics, magnetic-field patterns in iron filings, laboratory apparatus, and a church steeple with lightning conductor; letterpress "Revision" (errata) leaf at the end.
Binding: Original plain paper boards, manuscript paper spine label (chipped), paper shelf label at the spine foot ("Natur. W. 14").
Condition: Boards soiled and rubbed with surface losses, the spine label defective; internally clean and fresh, the plates with light offsetting and short closed tears at the folds; small marginal flaw to the title leaf. An unsophisticated copy in its first binding.
The two folding engraved plates are the best thing in this book. They are little galleries of the invisible made visible. On the first, among the pulleys and pistons, are the whiskered portraits of magnetic force: iron filings strewn around magnets and drawn exactly as they fall, bristling along the lines of a field no eye can see. Faraday would teach physics to take such pictures seriously as "lines of force" decades later. The second plate is busier. A U-magnet hangs its keeper, charged columns stack their plus and minus signs, furnaces drive vapors through coiled tubes. Best of all, a village church raises its onion-domed steeple fitted with a lightning conductor, the century's emblem of heaven's fire brought to heel. Both plates are signed simply "Zu Prof. Weber Dynamik der Materie" — for Professor Weber's Dynamics of Matter.
Joseph von Weber (1753–1831) was one of the great figures of the Catholic Enlightenment in Bavaria. He was a priest of the diocese of Augsburg and professor of physics and chemistry at Dillingen, Ingolstadt and Landshut. He was also a working experimentalist, who invented an air electrophorus in his twenties. The Leopoldina, the German academy of natural scientists, elected him in the very year this book appeared. The Bavarian crown knighted him later on and he was made vicar general of Augsburg, where a memorial stone in the cathedral still commemorates him.
His science ran in the dynamical tradition descended from Kant. Matter, on this account, is a living equilibrium of attractive and repulsive forces — nature as activity all the way down. Hence the splendid title: the science of material nature, or the Dynamics of Matter. Weber also wrote a treatise on animal magnetism as "the secret of human life," so the era's most fashionable occult science was well within his range.
The errata leaf repays a look. Headed "Revision," it corrects the text's discussion of the cause of magnetism, and pauses over one of the "daring hypotheses" then in circulation. Professor Steinhäuser of Halle had proposed that the magnetic mystery is the work of Minerva, a subordinate planet circling the center of the Earth at one-fifth of the Earth's radius, deep beneath our feet, once every 440 years. A whole planet inside the Earth, reported soberly in a list of corrections. Romantic science in one paragraph.
This copy sits in its original plain paper boards, soiled and rubbed and never restored. It went to the Capuchin friars of Mariabuchen, a Franconian pilgrimage cloister. The cloister's miraculous image, a Madonna in a beech tree, appears in the violet library stamp on the title. The friars' printed booklabel, shelved under "Naturwissenschaft," faces it inside the cover. Both folding plates are present, as called for.
Provenance: Library of the Capuchin friary at Mariabuchen, Franconia (pilgrimage cloister near Lohr am Main): violet pictorial inkstamp ("Klosterbibliothek Mariabuchen," with the Madonna in the beech tree) to the title, printed booklabel ("Bibliothek der Kapuziner Mariabuchen," shelfmark "Naturw. 14" in ink) to the front pastedown, matching spine label.
WEBER, Joseph von (1753-1831). Wissenschaft der materiellen Natur oder Dynamik der Materie. Munich: J. J. Lentner; Leipzig: Hartmann, 1821. First edition.
Physical Description: Octavo. With two folding engraved plates ("Mit zwei Kupfertafeln," Tafel I-II, signed "Zu Prof. Weber Dynamik der Materie"), depicting mechanics, electrostatics, magnetic-field patterns in iron filings, laboratory apparatus, and a church steeple with lightning conductor; letterpress "Revision" (errata) leaf at the end.
Binding: Original plain paper boards, manuscript paper spine label (chipped), paper shelf label at the spine foot ("Natur. W. 14").
Condition: Boards soiled and rubbed with surface losses, the spine label defective; internally clean and fresh, the plates with light offsetting and short closed tears at the folds; small marginal flaw to the title leaf. An unsophisticated copy in its first binding.
