Beschreibung:

LAPLACE, PIERRE SIMON DE, Marquis. Mécanique Céleste... Translated, with a Commentary, by Nathaniel Bowditch (--With a Memoir of the Translator, by his Son, Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch). Boston: Isaac R. Butts for Hilliard, Gray, Little and Wilkins (later Little and Brown) 1829-1839. 4 vols., 4to, 273 x 223mm. (10 3/4 x 8 3/4in.), late nineteenth century purple crushed levant morocco, covers with sawtooth and four fillet outer border, central rectangular panel with ornamental cornerpieces, spines in six compartments with five raised bands, gilt lettered in two compartments, an ornamental panel in the rest, board edges and turn-ins gilt, g.e., for Little Brown & Co., possibly by William Matthews very slight wear to extremities, inner joints weak, leaf 174/2 in vol. II torn and repaired affecting numeral, occasional faint stains. FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH, one of 500 copies, half-titles, 3 engraved portraits (Laplace, Bowditch and his wife), numerous mathematical diagrams. A fine copy of the first translation of "'the eighteenth-century Almagest' and 'a sequel to Newton's Principia '" (--Grolier/Horblit 63, citing the first edition, Paris [1798-] 1827). "Laplace has been called the 'Newton of France'. In his monumental 'Treatise on Celestial Mechanics'...he codified and developed the theories and achievements of...Newton, Euler, d'Alembert and of his contemporary Lagrange, whose Méchanique Analitique had been published in 1788." (-- Printing and the Mind of Man , no. 252). Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), the translator, rose to prominence by his revision of the English work by J.H. Moore, The Practical Navigator in 1799. Nine editions of the work were published during his life. The herculean task of translating Laplace's great work was all complete by 1818 but publication was delayed for eleven years. Bowditch was much too careful and thorough an editor to relinquish control and he waited until he had accumulated $12,000 for publication expenses. His translation, plus his notes on Laplace's original text, occupy a book almost twice the length of the original edition. Provenance according to a pencilled note laid in:] Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch, son of Nathaniel Bowditch. Also laid in is an autograph letter from Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (third son of Nathaniel) to J.I. Bowditch, 29 Jan. 1884, 3 pp., 8vo, and a slip, offering suggestions for a third edition of the 'Memoir' of their father -- Abbot family, Boston (from whom purchased by Gannon) -- Harrison D. Horblit. (4)