Inside the book

A university course in physics by a Somascan priest teaching at the Archbishop's Liceo and a member of the Neapolitan Royal Academy, issued in two parts under separate titles: Scienza della natura generale, Parte prima, and Scienza della natura particolare, Parte seconda, Il mondo terrestre. Both title pages share one printer's device, an armillary sphere among laurel branches. The second volume prints a table of its sections and chapters, an ordine delle tavole assigning the plates by subject, and errata for the first part. The first volume is the general physics. A preface argues that physics depends on mathematics, tracing the two sciences from the Greeks through the Arabs to Galileo, and distinguishes three methods of natural philosophy, the ideal, the verisimilar and the real. The text proceeds by numbered propositions, from the properties of body and the laws of motion through mechanics, ballistics and central forces to the secondary affections of matter, with an index of propositions and an alphabetical index of matters that also serves as an index of the authorities cited, among them Archimedes, Aristotle, Bernoulli, Boyle and Descartes. The second volume is the particular physics of the terrestrial world, arranged from the figure of the Earth and its interior, through its surface and waters, to the atmosphere, light and meteors. Chemistry, the magnet, volcanoes, electricity, plants and animals each have their chapters, and a closing section explains the anatomical plates figure by figure. Sixty-two engraved plates and tables, numbered in Roman numerals, accompany the text, many folding, with letterpress tables set into the sequence. The first volume's plates are geometrical and mechanical: constructions in plane and solid geometry, a comparison of the inch as measured in the Rhineland, Paris, Holland, Naples, Rome and England, a table of the length of the seconds pendulum at places from the Caribbean to Quito, a plate of levers and balances in which two men carry a loaded pole, and electrical apparatus at work, with a man standing on an insulating stool beside a glass globe machine. The second volume's plates are numbered by subject: a table of the degrees of latitude according to Cassini and to Clairaut and Maupertuis; a prism experiment, with a boy at a window looking through a prism and the bands of the spectrum labeled in Latin; and four anatomical plates of the brain and spinal cord, the heart and diaphragm, and the viscera. One plate is signed by the engraver Filosi.