An History of The Earth, and Animated Nature.
London: J. Nourse, 1774. 8 vols., 8vo, , xviii, 401; , 399; , 403; , 538 (i.e. 358); , 400; , 406; , 368; , 200, [334, index] pp. 101 plates, of which 28 are engraved by Elias Martin [1739-1818], and 73 by Isaac Taylor [1730-1807]. Contemporary calf, red and green morocco labels, yellow edges. A very good set. First edition, first issue with p. 91 in vol. 2 uncancelled (see below). Oliver Goldsmiths An History of the Earth and Animated Nature has been described as everything from hackwork to his most substantial literary legacy (Wardle, 1957). The first edition (in eight volumes) appeared in London in 1774 and was pirated in the same year. The work sought to draw together virtually all that was known about the planet earth, its plants and animals, and even its human inhabitants described from a biological perspective. Although Goldsmith drew almost all of his information from the work of other naturalists, he set out with a very Romantic goal in mind. He had first planned to translate Plinys Natural History and then, after reading Buffon, he decided that the best imitation of the ancients was to write from our own feelings and to imitate nature. The linking of emotion and mimetic imitation to the natural world echoed precisely the claims poets would be making for the next century. Goldsmiths Animated Nature went through over twenty editions into the Victorian era; though it can be criticized on technical grounds, the work became the source of what countless individuals in the English-speaking world knew about the natural world around them. Goldsmith wrote with clarity and precision; for example, he admitted one of the most common confusions in natural history of the period in his discussion of the border between plants and animals: it frequently puzzles the naturalist to tell exactly where animal life begins, and vegetable terminates; nor, indeed, is it easy to resolve, whether some objects offered to view be of the lowest of the animal, or the highest of the vegetable races. The sensitive plant, that moves at the touch, seems to have as much perception as the fresh water polypus, that is possessed of a still slower share of motion. Besides, the sensitive plant will not reproduce upon cutting it in pieces, which the polypus is known to do; so that the vegetable production seems to have the superiority. Goldsmith weighed in on the side of those who believed that all human varieties derived from a single species, admitting however that great changes seemed able to occur in individual members of a species, including our own. His entire discussion of humans takes place, significantly, in a section of his work entitled An History of Animals: If we look round the world, there seem to be not above six distinct varieties in the human species, each of which is strongly marked, and speaks the kind seldom to have mixed with any other. But there is nothing in the shape, nothing in the faculties, that shows their coming from different originals; and the varieties of climate, of nourishment, and custom, are sufficient to produce every change. Dr. Johnson wrote an epitaph in Westminster Abbey that affirms natural historys importance in Goldsmiths canon: To the Memory of Oliver Goldsmith, poet, naturalist and historian. (Ashton Nichols). Nissen ZBI, 1621 (calls for 94 plates). Ward & Carozzi, 932. Freeman 1352. Anker 167. Tinker 1137. Wood, p. 362. Lowndes notes that a leaf was cancelled which describes the famed mathematician Maclaurin as constantly yawning (vol. 2, p.91/2).
(Item Id: 5231)