Osservazioni sopra la ruggine del grano

8vo (217x148 mm.). 114 pp., [1] engraved colour folding plate. Woodcut tail-pieces and initials. Worm track to the upper margin of the first four leaves not affecting the text. Contemporary cardboards ‘alla rustica' with manuscript title on spine. Occasionally slightly browned, but a very good, genuine  copy. Uncut.
First edition of this important text on phytopathology, in which the author demonstrated that the disease that afflicted the wheat in the Tuscan countryside in those years, covering it with a rust-colored powder, was actually due to a parasitic plant, the Puccinia graminis, of which he provided an accurate morphological description. The work thus represents one of the earliest examples of microscopic investigation conducted for social purposes. Also, the colored illustrations showing Puccinia graminis and Uredo, are pioneering for the time (P.A. Saccardo, La Botanica in Italia. Materiali per la storia di questa scienza, Venice, 1895, Ia, p. 74).



"In 1766 Fontana demonstrated that the blight which had devastated the Tuscun countryside was caused by parasitic plants that feed on grain and that reproduce by means of spores" (D.S.B., V, p. 56).



Felice Fontana, a native of Pomarolo in Trentino, studied in Rovereto under Girolamo Tartarotti, then mathematics in Parma under Belgrado and anatomy and physiology in Padua with G.B. Morgagni. Between 1755 and 1757 he was in Bologna, where he conducted various researches in experimental physiology together with L.M.A. Caldani. In 1765 he became professor of logic at the University of Pisa. The following year he was appointed court physicist by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo. At the latter's behest he founded the Museum of Physics and Natural History in Florence. In 1775 he set out on a five-year journey that took him to all the major European cities, where he got to know all the leading scientists of the time and published several memoirs and dissertations. He devoted the last years of his life to his museum and in particular to the anatomical waxes, made with the help of P. Mascagni, which shortly before his death were taken to France by Napoleon's troops. However, this did not prevent him from joining the republican cause. He died in Florence in 1805 (C. Adami, Di Felice e Gregorio Fontana, Rovereto, 1905, pp. VII-XIX).
His writings include the short treatise Dei moti dell'iride (Lucca, 1765), the physiological work De irritabilitatis legibus (Lucca, 1767), the Ricerche filosofiche sopra la fisica animale (Florence, 1775), the texts on carbon dioxide and air Ricerche fisiche sopra l'aria fissa (Florence, 1775) and Recherches physiques sur la nature de l'air nitreux et de l'air déphloghisté (Paris, 1776), and finally his masterpiece, the Traité sur le vénin de la vipère, sur les poisons americains, sur le laurier-cerise et sur quelques autres poisons végétaux (Florence, 1781, and then translated into Italian, English and German), a classic of toxicology and pharmacology.



Pritzel, 2956; F. Fontana, Observations on Rust of Grain, Phytopathological Classics no. 2, Washington DC, American Phytopathological Society, 1932; Adami, op. cit., p. XXXIX.