The word "protein" was four years old when the younger of these two books was printed. The Swedish chemist Berzelius coined it in 1838, in a letter to the Dutch chemist Gerardus Mulder, as a name for the substance that seemed to lie beneath every animal tissue. By 1842 the word had a chapter of its own in Carl Gotthelf Lehmann's Lehrbuch der physiologischen Chemie: protein dried and weighed, protein in acids and alkalis, its behavior set down in tables like any mineral's.
The other volume is a few years older. Carl Löwig, its author, had found the element bromine as a student at Heidelberg in 1825, by analyzing the spring water of his home town of Kreuznach. Löwig went to Zürich as professor of chemistry and wrote his Chemie der organischen Verbindungen there in two volumes. Ours is the second, printed in 1840. It opens on solid rose oil, of all things. The final page is errata, correcting formulas one atom at a time. Lehmann, for his part, was a Leipzig physician who rose to a professorship of physiological chemistry there. His Lehrbuch, begun in 1842, grew to three volumes and became the standard work of the new science. In the 1850s the Cavendish Society translated the whole of it into English.
These books take up the alchemists' question: what is the living body made of? Paracelsus taught that digestion was the work of an inner alchemist, a spirit he called the archeus, stationed in the stomach. In 1669 the Hamburg alchemist Hennig Brand boiled down vats of urine in search of the philosopher's stone and found phosphorus glowing in his retort instead. Lehmann worked at the far end of that tradition. He got his cystine from bladder stones, of men and of dogs, and admitted that nobody could so much as guess where the body finds all that sulfur. On page 751 of the Löwig, urea, the animal substance Friedrich Wöhler had built from a laboratory salt in 1828, stands beside cyanate of ammonia as the same atoms differently arranged. The vital force, the power that was supposed to separate living matter from dead, was never refuted in a single great debate.The two volumes share a binding style and library provenance. They are bound in matching contemporary half leather with marbled boards and red spine labels. Each title leaf carries the stamp of the same municipal library in Olomouc, Moravia. Each is an odd volume, the Lehmann being the first of its three, the Löwig the second of its two, and the pair is priced accordingly. Together they make a handsome introduction to the decade in which the chemistry of life began. Full details below.
LEHMANN, C. G. Lehrbuch der physiologischen Chemie. Von Dr. C. G. Lehmann, Privatdocenten an der Universität zu Leipzig. Erster Band. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilh. Engelmann; Rotterdam: bei Adolph Baedeker, 1842. First edition, volume one (of three).
LÖWIG, CARL. Chemie der organischen Verbindungen. Von Carl Löwig, Dr. der Medizin und Philosophie, Professor der Chemie an der Universität zu Zürich. Zweiter Band. Zürich: Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Schulthess, 1840. First edition, volume two (of two).
Physical Description: Two octavo volumes: the Lehmann the first volume (of three) of the first edition, the Löwig the second volume (of two) of the first edition, its text ending at page 751 with a closing page of errata and addenda numbered 762.
Binding: Matching contemporary half leather with marbled paper boards, smooth spines ruled in gilt, red labels lettered in gilt. Heads of both spines chipped with loss, corners bumped and worn, boards rubbed.
Condition: Text lightly browned with scattered foxing. Library stamps and shelfmarks as noted under Provenance.
Provenance: Both title leaves with the round Czech stamp of the Baugartnerova knihovna, a municipal library of Olomouc, in Moravia, and small ink shelfmarks.
The word "protein" was four years old when the younger of these two books was printed. The Swedish chemist Berzelius coined it in 1838, in a letter to the Dutch chemist Gerardus Mulder, as a name for the substance that seemed to lie beneath every animal tissue. By 1842 the word had a chapter of its own in Carl Gotthelf Lehmann's Lehrbuch der physiologischen Chemie: protein dried and weighed, protein in acids and alkalis, its behavior set down in tables like any mineral's.
The other volume is a few years older. Carl Löwig, its author, had found the element bromine as a student at Heidelberg in 1825, by analyzing the spring water of his home town of Kreuznach. Löwig went to Zürich as professor of chemistry and wrote his Chemie der organischen Verbindungen there in two volumes. Ours is the second, printed in 1840. It opens on solid rose oil, of all things. The final page is errata, correcting formulas one atom at a time. Lehmann, for his part, was a Leipzig physician who rose to a professorship of physiological chemistry there. His Lehrbuch, begun in 1842, grew to three volumes and became the standard work of the new science. In the 1850s the Cavendish Society translated the whole of it into English.
These books take up the alchemists' question: what is the living body made of? Paracelsus taught that digestion was the work of an inner alchemist, a spirit he called the archeus, stationed in the stomach. In 1669 the Hamburg alchemist Hennig Brand boiled down vats of urine in search of the philosopher's stone and found phosphorus glowing in his retort instead. Lehmann worked at the far end of that tradition. He got his cystine from bladder stones, of men and of dogs, and admitted that nobody could so much as guess where the body finds all that sulfur. On page 751 of the Löwig, urea, the animal substance Friedrich Wöhler had built from a laboratory salt in 1828, stands beside cyanate of ammonia as the same atoms differently arranged. The vital force, the power that was supposed to separate living matter from dead, was never refuted in a single great debate.The two volumes share a binding style and library provenance. They are bound in matching contemporary half leather with marbled boards and red spine labels. Each title leaf carries the stamp of the same municipal library in Olomouc, Moravia. Each is an odd volume, the Lehmann being the first of its three, the Löwig the second of its two, and the pair is priced accordingly. Together they make a handsome introduction to the decade in which the chemistry of life began. Full details below.
LEHMANN, C. G. Lehrbuch der physiologischen Chemie. Von Dr. C. G. Lehmann, Privatdocenten an der Universität zu Leipzig. Erster Band. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilh. Engelmann; Rotterdam: bei Adolph Baedeker, 1842. First edition, volume one (of three).
LÖWIG, CARL. Chemie der organischen Verbindungen. Von Carl Löwig, Dr. der Medizin und Philosophie, Professor der Chemie an der Universität zu Zürich. Zweiter Band. Zürich: Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Schulthess, 1840. First edition, volume two (of two).
Physical Description: Two octavo volumes: the Lehmann the first volume (of three) of the first edition, the Löwig the second volume (of two) of the first edition, its text ending at page 751 with a closing page of errata and addenda numbered 762.
Binding: Matching contemporary half leather with marbled paper boards, smooth spines ruled in gilt, red labels lettered in gilt. Heads of both spines chipped with loss, corners bumped and worn, boards rubbed.
Condition: Text lightly browned with scattered foxing. Library stamps and shelfmarks as noted under Provenance.
Provenance: Both title leaves with the round Czech stamp of the Baugartnerova knihovna, a municipal library of Olomouc, in Moravia, and small ink shelfmarks.
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