Lot 69
Black, Joseph
Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quick-Lime, and Other Alcaline Substances
The Library of James Stirling, Mathematician
Auction: 23 October 2025 from 13:00 GMT
Description
To which is annexed, An Essay on the Cold produced by Evaporating Fluids, and of some other Means of producing Cold; by William Cullen. Edinburgh: for William Creech, and for J. Murray, and Wallis and Stonehouse, London, 1777. Small 8vo in half-sheets (15.7 x 9cm), [2] 133 [1] pp., contemporary tree calf, smooth spine gilt in compartments, red morocco label, small woodcut in text [cf. Garrison-Morton 919 for the first edition, 1754, and Duveen p. 81 and Wellcome II p. 172 for the 1782 edition, also including Cullen's Essay; not in Ferguson]
Footnote
First separate edition in English, the third overall, of the most important works in the history of chemistry, Joseph Black's historic account of the isolation and discovery of carbon dioxide. It was first published in Latin as the author's MD thesis under the title De humore acido a cibis orto, et magnesia alba (1754), followed by an expanded English edition titled ‘Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime, and some Other Alcaline Substances’, which appeared in the second volume of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh's Essays and Observations (1756). The 1754 is a famous rarity; the present edition was the first to contain Cullen's Essay and is itself highly uncommon, with no other copy traced in auction records.