Lot 28
Nebel, Wilhelm Bernard
Dissertatio physica de Mercurio lucente in vacuo
The Library of James Stirling, Mathematician
Auction: 23 October 2025 from 13:00 GMT
Description
… sub praesidio … Joh. Bernoulli. Basel: Friderici Lüdii, [1719]. First edition, small 4to, 19th-century ‘divinity’ calf over bevelled boards by Maclehose of Glasgow for William Stirling of Tarduff, Stirling arms in gilt on both covers, bookplates of William Stirling and Archibald Stirling, pencilled annotation to first blank, joints and spine a little rubbed [not in Wellcome; Worldcat lists three copies only]
Footnote
First edition, presentation copy from Nicolaus Bernoulli to James Stirling, inscribed by Stirling ‘Ja: Stirling Ex dono viri cl[arissimi]. D. N. Bernoulli, Venetiis, 1st September 1719' on an initial blank.
After leaving Oxford and tempted by the possibility of a professorship of mathematics, probably at Padua, where it was customary to appoint a foreigner, James Stirling had gone to Italy, and by 1719 was in Venice, a favourite haunt of members of the Bernoulli family. There he met Nicolaus Bernoulli (1687-1759), professor of mathematics at Padua, who presented Stirling with this copy of Nebel’s doctoral dissertation on barometric light, awarded under the direction of his uncle Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748), himself an authority on the subject. Bernard Wilhelm Nebel (1699-1748) was one of the first iatrophysicists (iatrophysics being the medical doctrine that the changes in the life processes and pathology of an organism are purely physical and mechanical and the body should be understood as a machine), and one of the first doctors in Germany to study the inoculation of smallpox, publishing on the subject from 1729 onwards. ‘The Nebel thesis gave [Johann] Bernoulli an opportunity to sum up the knowledge and to answer his critics. The pamphlet ends with a discussion of the uses of the light and dedicatory poems’ (Harvey, A History of Luminescence from the Earliest Times until 1900, 1957, p. 274). It was printed in Johann Bernoulli's collected works (see lot 27).
Stirling's meeting with Nicolaus Bernoulli in Venice in 1719 is referred to in a surviving letter from Bernoulli to Stirling (lot 29). This is one of two books rescued from the office of the mining company at Leadhills by William Stirling of Tarduff, and rebound, the other being a copy of Brook Taylor’s Methodus incrementorum (lot 50).