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• Natural history • Voyages and travel
LEEUWENHOEK, A. VAN. Ontledingen en Ontdekkingen... Brieven [Brieven seu Werken]. Leiden,
Delft, Boutesteyn and Krooneveld, 1684-1718. 6 volumes. 4to (185 x 150 mm), with 3 engraved frontispieces, engraved portrait, 100 engraved plates (many folding) and 123 engravings in text, 2 full-page. 18th century half calf, old repair to spines, marbled sides. € 40.000,First editions, first issues and an absolutely complete set of Leeuwenhoek’s letters, very rare, in their first appearance in the original Dutch. Although various assemblies of Dutch texts appear in various guises, a complete set such as this, in first issue, is extremely uncommon. In 1672 Leeuwenhoek began to make his own microscopes with extremely powerful lenses, with which he examined innumerable organic and inorganic structures. Regner de Graaf introduced him to the Royal Society in 1673, and from then on for half a century he wrote long letters to the Society in which he described a vast array of discoveries. He was the first to observe, inter alia, the red blood cells, and he saw the passage of blood from the arteries to the veins in the fin of a fish in 1688. This event was the final proof of Harvey’s circulation theory. He first described, in about thirty letters, micro-organisms, including bacteria, protozoa, and rotifers. His discovery of unicellular life made him the father of Microbiology. At the suggestion of the medical student Johann Ham, Leeuwenhoek examined seminal fluid and observed spermatozoa, which he called ‘little animals’ (animalcula). He was convinced that man was preformed in them, and thus started a long-running debate with the Harveian school. He is one of the greatest figures in the history of microscopy, and is with Hooke the only seventeenth-century microscopist about whose technique anything is known. Leeuwenhoek wrote more than 350 letters to the Royal Society; these were abridged or summarized in English translation in the Phil. trans. The original texts were published in Dutch and in Latin translation. Because of peculiarities of the Dobell bibliography, the complete letters in Dutch comprise Dobell numbers 1-10, 12-16, and 18 (Dobell 11 is a separate printing of Letter 65 only, and is contained in Dobell 12 comprising letters 6167, and Dobell 17 is a later edition of Dobell 4). These are collectively grouped under Dobell 20 (‘Perfect copies, composed of first editions throughout, and with all the plates, are now extremely rare’). Traces of old stamp on first title of each volume. Horblit 65; PMM 166 (citing the later Latin edition because of availability); Evans 94; Dibner 189n; entries in Krivatsy and Norman for incomplete sets.
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