The Dibner Library acquires a Herald of Science:
Joseph Lister's classic work of 1867, "On the antiseptic principle in the practice of surgery."

Lister, Joseph (1827-1912). "On a new method of treating compound fracture, abscess, etc., with observations on the conditions of suppuration," in Lancet 1 (1867): 326-329, 357-359, 387-389, 507-509; 2 (1867): 95-96. WITH: "On the antiseptic principle in the practice of surgery," in Lancet 2 (1867): 353-356, 668-669. Together two volumes of the Lancet, 4to. [2], 818; [2], 826 pp.

This set of the first two volumes of Lancet is an excellent addition to the Dibner Library for a number of reasons. Foremost is the fact that it contains the above mentioned Lister articles, the second of which is one of three Heralds of Science (#133) that was not in the Library's collections. In his book, Heralds of Science, Bern Dibner described the importance of the work thusly: "Napoleon's surgeon, Larrey, reported only two survivals in several thousand amputations at the hip; modern military surgery attains a mortality rate of less than one percent--the difference lies in the principle of asepsis promoted by Lister, professor of surgery at Glasgow. With Pasteur's germ theory of disease as a guide [Herald #198], carbolic acid, then used to disinfect sewage, became the medium for killing the germs causing suppuration in wounds. Lister applied dressings of dilute carbolic acid on wounds and fractures and sprayed the operating rooms with it. Later, the cleanliness of aseptic surgery (excluding germs altogether) was practiced." To be sure, the first article, "On a new method of treating compound fracture, abscess, etc. ...," is no less important than the second and we are happy to have it as well. The research value of our new acquisition is enhanced by the fact that the articles are in the context of their respective journal volume as opposed to having been disbound. The difficulty in finding other early editions of these works is increased since no offprints of Lister's works are known, and so the only available versions of the first edition are in (or removed from) the journal.

The Dibner Library obtains another Herald of Science: A set of Acts of Parliament relating to the longitude problem.

Recently the Dibner Library acquired a collection of Acts of the British Parliament and two period newspaper articles relating to the longitude problem and calendar reform. The purchase of the set was made possible with the Special Collections Endowment Fund. The importance of solving the problems of longitude and calendar reform were critical to the history of science and technology and this collection will enhance the research and exhibition values of the Dibner Library's holdings.

The problem of finding longitude at sea grew in importance as the European powers continued to engage in expansion and colonization. In 1714 the Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to anyone who could discover a method of finding the longitude within half a degree at the end of a voyage to the West Indies. John Harrison, an English horologist, set about the task of creating an extremely reliable chronometer which would provide a reference point against the navigator's local time, thus enabling him to calculate the longitude of his location. From 1735 to 1762 Harrison built four different chronometers in order to gain the prize. Harrison's fourth chronometer met the challenge, but due to competing interests such as Tobias Mayer's method of using lunar tables, among other factors, he did not receive the full prize until 1773. There are eight separate items in the collection of materials in the set acquired by SIL. Four of them are extracts from the printed Acts of Parliament during the critical years when Harrison petitioned the Board of Longitude to grant him the prize:

• "An Act for rendering more effectual an Act made in the twelfth year of the reign of her late majesty Queen Anne, intituled, 'An Act for providing a publick reward for such person or persons as shall discover the longitude at sea', with regard to the making experiments of proposals made for discovering the longitude" (1762)
• "An Act for the encouragement of John Harrison, to publish and make known his invention of a machine or watch, for the discovery of the longitude at sea" (1763)
• "An Act for explaining and rendering more effectual two Acts, one made in the twelfth year of the reign of Queen Anne, intituled, 'An Act for providing a publick reward for such person or persons as shall discover the longitude at sea', and the other ... intituled, ‘An Act to render more effectual an Act ... intituled, 'An Act for providing a publick reward ...'" (1765)
• "An Act for rendering more effectual several Acts for providing a publick reward for discovering the longitude at sea; for improving the lunar tables constructed by the late Professor Mayer; and for encourageing discoveries and improvements useful to navigation" (1770)

These Acts constitute one of Bern Dibner's "Heralds of Science," number 178 of the 200 works he saw as the most significant in the formation and development of Western science and technology. With its purchase, SIL now only lacks one remaining Herald of the entire set of 200.

In addition to the four Acts mentioned above, the set also contains two newspaper articles relating to the longitude controversy, one a contemporary notice and the latter from a later period with a different viewpoint on the matter:

• "A vindication of the practice of navigation, against the Portsmouth Objector's conclusions, concerning Mr. Harrison's watch, or time-piece" / by the Palladium author [i.e. Robert Heath], in: The London chronicle, or universal evening post, v. 16 (Thurs. Sept. 20-Sat. Sept. 22, 1764), p. 284
• "Longitude" / [anonymously written], in: The courier, no. 4213 (Thurs. Feb. 27, 1806), p. [2]

The final two items in the set are also Acts of Parliament, but they are related to another time-problem of the eighteenth century: British calendar reform. The British refused to accept the 1582 calendar reforms of Pope Gregory XIII for more than 150 years, but by the 1750s they could no longer ignore the grievous errors in the old Julian calendar. In 1752 the Parliament finally accepted the Gregorian calendar and skipped eleven days from the month of September (going directly from Sept. 2nd to Sept. 14th) in order to catch up with the new calendar. The two Acts that represent this historic measure are:

• "An Act for regulating the commencement of the year; and for correcting the calendar now in use" (1751)
• "An Act to amend an Act made in the last session of Parliament, intituled, 'An Act for regulating the commencement of the year, and for correcting the calendar now in use'" (1752)

Together, these items make for a remarkable set of historic documents that mark an important moment, not only in the history of technology, but also British and American colonial history.

An early Christiaan Huygens work

Huygens, Christiaan. De circuli magnitudine inventa. Accedunt eiusdem problematum quorundam illustrium constructiones. Leiden : J. and D. Elzevier, 1654.

This work is an excellent addition to the research value of the collections in the Dibner Library. The author, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), was one of the leading scientists and mathematicians of the seventeenth century and his oeuvre is well represented in the Dibner Library, including his three classic works, Systema Saturnium (1659), Traite de la lumiere (1690), and Horlogium oscillatorium (1673). Huygens studied mathematics and law at the University of Leiden (1645-1647) and law at the Collegium Arausiacum (1647-1649). After he completed his studies he did not go into a career of diplomatic service as was expected, but instead stayed at home for the next sixteen years and pursued his interests in mathematics and physics thanks to an allowance from his father. Huygens first worked on mathematical problems, particularly determinations of quadratures and cubatures (finding the area of a circle and volume of a sphere, respectively), and algebraic problems inspired by Pappus's works (the Dibner Library has a 1589 edition of Pappus). His first publication appeared in 1651, and in 1654 he published his second book, De circuli magnitudine inventa [Inventions about the magnitude of a circle]. This book shows us the inventiveness of Huygens's mathematical mind: using a parabola, he takes its center of gravity and approximates the center of gravity of a circle and finds an approximation of the circle's quadrature. This, then, allowed Huygens to better refine the inequalities between the area of a circle and its inscribed and circumscribed polygons used to calculate pi. This work illustrated Huygens's prowess at using classical methods applied to a classical problem to find new results. After its publication, Huygens was hailed as "the reborn Vieta and compared with Pappus and Apollonius, two giants of classical Greek geometry (Bell, Christiaan Huygens, p. 25)." De circuli is an important addition to the numerous works in the Dibner Library that relate to Huygens, the classical problems of conic sections, and the squaring of the circle.

A rare two-volume work on centers of gravity

Guldin, Paul. De centro gravitatis. Vienna, Gregor Gelbhaar, 1635-1641.

Guldin (1577-1643) was a Jesuit who taught mathematics at colleges in Rome, Graz, and Vienna. His most notable achievement was the publication of De centro gravitatis. The study of centers of gravity became of interest to scholars in the 14th century as Jean Buridan and Nicolas Oresme wrote extensively on the topic in their studies of the Earth and its relation to the center of the universe. Guldin in 1622 believed that any large body whose center of gravity is not at the center of the universe would, if unimpeded, tend towards the latter. De centro gravitatis is Guldin's attempt to develop his mathematical reasoning about centers of gravity. In the first volume of his work, Guldin determined the centers of gravity of plane and solid figures and countered attacks made against his earlier work by Niccolò Cabeo in his Philosophia magnetica of 1629 (a copy of which is in the Dibner Library).

The second volume of the work, published six years later in 1641, contains the noted theorem now named for Guldin: "If any plane figure revolves about an external axis in its plane, the volume of the solid so generated is equal to the product of the area of the figure and the distance traveled by the center of gravity of the figure." Guldin's theorem has been accused by some later scholars to be a plagiarism of the work of Pappus of Alexandria, first printed in Latin in 1589 (in the Mathematicæ collectiones, translated by Commandino, a copy of which is in the Dibner Library). Guldin's volume continues with his work on finding the surfaces and volumes of various solids of revolution, a direct follow-up to the work of Johannes Kepler in his Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum of 1615 (also in the Dibner Library). Guldin then criticized Bonaventura Cavalieri and his use of indivisibles in the work Geometria indivisibilibus (the Dibner Library has a copy of the second edition of this work).

De centro gravitatis is closely tied into the mathematics of the 17th century and in the debate on indivisibles which led to the development of the calculus. Its close connection to a number of works already in the Dibner Library was sufficient reason alone to justify its purchase. It has great research potential in terms of its importance to the history of mathematics, physics (both in mechanics and magnetism), surveying, and early trade industries (such as barrel-making).

A rare book "containing the most important Italian contribution to physical thought prior to Galileo."

Benedetti, Giovanni Battista. Speculationum liber ; in quo mira subtilitate haec tractata continentur. Venice : Boretium, 1599.

Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530-1590) is best known in the history of science as the most important immediate forerunner of Galileo. Starting his career as court mathematician to the Duke of Parma, he moved to Turin at the invitation of the Duke of Savoy where he served as the duke's philosopher. Benedetti's first publications relate to his study of falling bodies. His early conclusions led him to the concept that unequal bodies of the same material would fall at equal speeds in a vacuum. He continued work on mechanical topics and this culminated in his final work, the Diversarum speculationum of 1585­­which appeared in a second edition in 1599 as Speculationum liber, the book that we have recently acquired. This work has been described by Stillman Drake as "containing the most important Italian contribution to physical thought prior to Galileo." It contains a commentary on Euclid's fifth book of the Elements (held in several editions in the Dibner Library), a critique of certain parts of the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanica (three editions in the Dibner Library), and propositions in Tartaglia's Quesiti et inventioni diverse (also in the Dibner Library). The Speculationum liber's best known content is Benedetti's proposal of a thought experiment that was a precursor of Galileo's: to show the equality of speed of different weights falling in a vacuum, Benedetti supposed two equal weights connected by a line to fall at the same speed as a single body having their combined weight. He then appeals to the reader's intuition to imagine that, if disconnected, the two equal bodies would continue to fall at the same speed that they had before and so equal to the speed of the heavier weighted body. Galileo proposed a more rigorous example of a similar thought experiment to show the contradictions in Aristotle's view. We already have three of Benedetti's works in the Dibner Library and this work is a welcome addition.

The master of pi

Ceulen, Ludolph van. Van den circkel, daer in gheleert werdt te winden de naeste propertie des circkels-diameter teghen synen omloop, daer door all circkels...recht ghemeten connen werden... Leiden: Joost van Colster, 1615.

Ludolph Van Ceulen (1540-1610) is best known as a fencing master and a master mathematician as well. He opened a fencing school in Leiden in 1594 and in 1600 was appointed as a teacher of arithmetic, surveying, and fortification at the new engineering school in Leiden founded by Maurice of Nassau. Ceulen was acknowledged by his contemporaries as the master at computing the value of the irrational number pi, so much so that pi was often known as "Ludolph's number." Once he discovered the works of Archimedes (contemporary copies of which are in the Dibner Library), especially The measurement of the circle, Ceulen began his computations along the lines of the Syracusan mathematician. His greatest work is his Van den circkel of 1596, which appeared in a second edition in 1615-–the one that the Dibner Library just acquired. The work has four sections, the first being on the computation of pi. The second edition contains his calculation of pi out to thirty-three decimal places. Ceulen's work was the most impressive achievement to that time of the manifold attempts to find the ratio of circumference to diameter in a circle. The other sections of the work deal with how to compute the sides of regular polygons of any number of sides and tables of sines and interest. Ceulen's work with polygons showed that he was as skilled as his French contemporary Viète (whose works are well represented in the Dibner Library). The work will fit in well with the six contemporary copies the Dibner Library has of works dedicated to squaring the circle as well as the numerous other mathematical works that contain material on that popular mathematical pastime.