Musaeum Regalis Societatis or a Catalogue & Description Of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge. Made By Nehemiah Grew M. D. Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Colledge of Physitians. Whereunto is Subjoyned the Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts. By the same Author.
London: Hugh Newman, 1681.
Price: $6,800.00
Folio: 32 x 20.4 cm. A6, B-Z4, Aa-Zz4, Aaa-Ddd4 (Ddd3, blank, present. Ddd4 is div. title), A-E4, F2. With an engraved portrait and thirty-one engraved plates (one folding).
SOLE EDITION.
Including thirty-one full-paged engraved plates (one folding) of the marvelous and exotic subjects of the collections of the Royal Society. This copy is bound in contemporary English mottled calf, rebacked, with repairs to hinges and corners but preserving the original spine and labels; short split along leather where lower board meets the spine; light wear to extremities. Internally a very good, crisp copy with minor blemishes: endpapers browned, title page a bit yellowed, light staining to inner margins of opening leaves, light browning to edges of final plates; a few marginal tears discreetly mended (no loss). Contemporary corrections in the text. Nat. paper flaw blank margin plate 17 (not affecting image), some mild spotting. Provenance: Otto Oren Fisher (1881-1961), physician and collector.
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 as one of the first scientific societies; it counted Boyle, Hooke, Halley, and Newton among its early members. This book is the catalogue of the nascent collection of the Society. At the core of the collection are donations from the “curiosity cabinets” of the Society’s membership, and Robert Hubert’s cabinet of “natural rarities”, purchased by the Society in 1665. The catalogue is the work of Nehemiah Grew, one of the most distinguished scientists of the 17th century, best known for work in plant anatomy, and one of the earliest comparative anatomists to use the microscope. This book also includes his study of the digestive organs, “the first zoological book to have the term ‘comparative anatomy’ on the title page, and also the first attempt to deal with one system of organs only by the comparative method.” (Garrison-Morton 297).
The Collections of the Royal Society:
The world surrendered its most notable artifacts, natural and otherwise. Some of the ‘oddities’ described include: an Egyptian mummy, a male human fetus, the “skin of a moor”, the skeleton of an abortive human fetus, human skulls, a penis, the womb of a woman, a sloth, a monstrous calf with two heads, a crocodile, a chameleon, a senembi lizard of Brazil, the skin of a few snakes from Brazil, a great bat from the West Indies, a Bird of Paradise, the leg of a dodo, several loons, an auk (now extinct), many eggs and nests, coral, stones, gems, an air pump, a condensing engine, a weather clock, two microscopes, an otocoustick, a reflecting telescope, a model of a winding stair case, a double bottomed ship, a canoe, a poisoned dagger, a cider press, Virginian money, a hammock, many Native American everyday objects, Icelandic gloves, the fan of an Indian king, a snow shoe from Greenland, and much more.
The illustrations include a hippopotamus skull, the buttock skin of a rhinoceros, tortoise shells, the skeleton of a crocodile, the sea unicorn, a coconut, fish, bird’s nests, shells, insects, and more.
Heirs of Hippocrates, 640; Wing G-1952; Garrison-Morton 297; Wellcome III, p.164.