Descrizione

“THE ONLY BOOK REVIEW EVER KNOWN TO UNDERGO TRANSFORMATION INTO A TEXTBOOK” (GRAFTON)
4to (214x145 mm). [4], 476, [31 of 32] leaves. Lacking the final blank. Collation: *4 a-zz4 A-ZZ4 Aa-Mmm4. With several woodcut illustrations and diagrams in the text. Roman, Greek and italic types. Colophon (Lutetiae Parisiorum, imprimebat Michael Vascosanus, 1557. Mense Iulio) at l. Mmm3r. 18th-century mottled calf, gilt spine with double morocco lettering piece, red edges, marbled endleaves (joints and spine restored). Ownership inscription on the title page hardly readable: “Nunc Ludovici de Thefut […] Empto ex bibliotheca M Baptistae Mussi 1582”. Pale stain at the end of volume. A very good copy.
First edition, issue with Vascosan's name both on the title page and at the colophon (a few copies of this edition survive with the name of the typographer Fédéric Morel on the title page).
“Scaliger was proud of his dispoutations nature. In the Exotericarum exercitationum (1557) he wrote: ‘Vives maintains that silent meditation is more profitable than dispute. This is not true. Truth is brought forth by a collision of minds, as fire by a collision of stones. Unless I discover an antagonist, I can do nothing successfully'. As Scaliger made his reputation by an attack on Erasmus, so he confirmed it with a spirited critique of Cardano's De subtilitate libri XXI. The Exotericarum exercitationum runs to well over 1,200 pages. When Cardano failed to reply immediately, Scaliger, believing a false rumor that Cardano had died, was stricken with remorse and wrote a funeral oration in which he repented for the onslaught on his late opponent. Ironically, Cardano published his reply [Actio prima in calumniatorem librorum de subtilitate] two years after Scaliger's death. Scaliger based his critique on a reprint (Lyons, 1554) of the first edition of De subtilitate, rather than the revised second edition (Basel, 1554) (perhaps because of difficulty of access to the latter). The full title of the Exotericarum exercitationum implies that the critique is merely the fifteenth book of Scaliger's philosophical exercises (the first fourteen remained unpublished). Following its target, the work ranges over the whole of natural philosophy. In astronomy Scaliger ridiculed Cardano's stress on the astrological significance of comets; and he denied that the world's decay is proven because the apse of the sun was thirty-one semidiameters nearer the earth than in Ptolemy's time. Scaliger also rejected several of Cardano's beliefs in natural history: that the swan sings at its death; that gems have occult virtues (‘a flea has more virtue than all the gems'); that there exist corporeal spirits that eat; that the bear forms its cub by licking; and that the peacock is ashamed of its ugly legs. Like Cardano, Scaliger was aware that lead and tin gain in weight during calcination, although he preferred to explain the increase as a result of the addition of particles of fire to the metal. In order to refute Cardano's theory of the origin of mountain springs, Scaliger used the strange argument that the sea is not in its natural place, since earth should be nearer than water to the center of the earth. Consequently, seawater presses upward, emerging sometimes through superior earth as a mountain spring. This view, of course, failed to account for the difference in salinity between sea and mountain water. Scaliger casts aside Cardano's Aristotelian view that the medium is a motive force. This view is refuted experimentally when a thin wooden disk, cut from a plank, is set to spin within the plank. According to Scaliger, the air between the disk and the surrounding plank is insufficient to act as a motive force, as postulated by the Aristotelians. Instead, as an admirer of Parisian dynamics, Scaliger preferred to use the impetus theory (whịch he called motio). Following Albert of Saxony and Jean Buridan, Scaliger stated that accelerated motion is a result of a persisting gravity within