Description
First Edition. French text. Hard cover, quarto, in publisher's paper-covered boards with gilt leather spine labels. Letter press printed on mold made paper. **CONDITION: Very Good Minus. Corners of covers very worn, and pieces missing from foot of backstrip. Internally bright, with light foxing to a few pages only, occasional browning. COLLATION: []x2, 1-36x4 37x2; A4-I4, K4-Q4, R2; [4], 288, cxxxii pp. One foldout illustration. ** A publication of the INSTITUT DE FRANCE. ** CONTENTS: (articles)""Mémoire sur une nouvelle application de la Théorie des Oscillations de la Lumière"" (Poggendorff I, 196), by Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862). Biot made discoveries on the polarization of light, proved the existence of meteorites, and studied the effects of elevation on the Earth's magnetic field by taking an daring hot-air balloon trip with his fellow scientist, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. He co-authored a study of magnetic field lines with Alexander von Humboldt, and his contributions to magnetism were later recognized in the naming of the Biot-Savart law of magnetism. * ""Résultat des Observations Météorologiques, faites à Clermont-Ferrand, depuis le mois de juin 1806 jusqu'à la fin de 1813"", by Louis François Élisabeth Ramond, baron de Carbonnières (1755-1827). Ramond was a keen mountaineer, and was one of the first to explore the Pyrenees mountains bordering France and Spain. * ""Mémoire st Observations sur les Plantes de la famille des Cypérées"", by Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot, Baron de Beauvois (1752-1820). Palisot was a French botanist and entomologist who traveled to Africa, Haiti and America to collect and study specimens. He was hit by one disaster after another: the British destroyed his African trading post. Thereafter, he contracted yellow fever and was put on a ship to Haiti. In Haiti, the slave uprising of the Haitian revolution resulted in the loss of his collection to fire, and to his imprisonment. When he was sentenced to deportation, he avoided going to France just after the French Revolution, and instead sailed to America. He was robbed on the journey and arrived in Philadelphia penniless - he was forced to join a circus (as a musician) to provide for himself. He continued his specimen collecting in America, and returned to France with them when it was safe to do so. He sent his collections ahead of his own trip, but they were lost to a shipwreck off Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, he was able to write and publish a number of booklets on his discoveries. * ""Mémoire sur l'Iode"" (Poggendorff I, 862), by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778-1850). Gay-Lussac is known for his discovery, with Alexander von Humboldt, that water is made up of one part (by volume) of oxygen to two parts of hydrogen. In 1811, he recognized Iodine as a new element. He was also the co-discoverer of Boron, and the discoverer of the law governing the volume of a gas under constant pressure: ""Charles's Law"", sometimes known as ""Gay-Lussac's Law"". * ""Mémoire sur...
