Books

4 parts in 1 volume. Title page printed in red & black within a double-ruled border. Illustrated with 19 folding copperplate engravings. [4], 144, 211, [1] pages. (In the second sequence, p. 120 is marked 112, and there are blank pages between 137-8 and 138-9). Thick 4to, contemporary blind-tooled paneled calf, well-worn and now expertly re-backed in sympathetic leather (contemporary signatures on title dated 1704, and rear endpaper; last several pages have marginal dampstains, otherwise a remarkably clean crisp copy). London: Smith & Walford, Printers to the Royal Society, 1704. First edition, first issue - with the author not named on title page. "Newton's Opticks expounds his corpuscular theory of light and summarizes his experiments concerning light and colour. It also prints two important mathematical treatises (omitted in later editions) describing his invention of the fluxional calculus, the grounds for his claim of priority over Leibniz. Newton arrived at most of his unconventional ideas on colour by about 1668, and Opticks was largely complete by 1692. However, when he first partially expressed his theories in public, in 1672 and 1675, they provoked hostile criticism, especially on the continent. As a result, Newton delayed the publication of Opticks until his most vociferous critics - especially Robert Hooke - were dead. Unusually for Newton, and in what was probably a further defensive move, the work was first published in English rather than Latin, becoming a major contribution to the development of vernacular scientific literature. By about 1715, Opticks established itself as a model for interweaving theory with quantitative experimentation. Newton's aim was not to "explain the properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments" (p. 1). The great achievement of the work was to show that colour was a mathematically definable property." The work contains: The First Book of Opticks, The Second Book of Opticks, The Thrid Book of Opticks (Tertii Ordinis: Enumeratio Linearum), Tractatus de Quadratura Curvarum. The main work is in English, the 2 treatises (pages 138-211) are in Latin. Babson 132; Gray 174; Horblit 79b; PMM 172; Norman 1588; Dibner 148; Wallis 174.

Isaac Newton's 'Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light' was originally published in Latin as 'Optice: sive, De Reflexionibus, Refractionibus, Inflexionibus et Coloribus Lucis, Libri Tres'. This work is Newton's study of the behavior of light and color, detailing his experiments with prisms and the color spectrum.