From Feathers to Flatulence
BACON, Francis.
Sylva sylvarum, sive historia naturalis, in decem centurias distributa, Anglice olim conscripta ... nunc Latio [sic] transscripta a Iacobo Grutero ... [with:] Novus atlas, opus imperfectum, Latine conscriptum ... cum praefatione W. Rawley. Amsterdam, Louis Elzevir, 1648.
Two parts in one vol., 12mo, pp. [36], 612, [48]; 87, [1 (blank)]; additional engraved title-page, initials, head- and tailpieces; some dampstaining to upper margins, a few light marks; good in contemporary vellum, yapp fore-edges, edges blue; ties wanting, some marks; inscriptions to title ‘sum Dude?’, ‘J. Astrap’, and ‘sum Fride[rici] a Bockwoldes’; seventeenth-century annotations in brown ink (sometimes very pale) to endpapers and c. 300 pp., some underlining.
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Sylva sylvarum, sive historia naturalis, in decem centurias distributa, Anglice olim conscripta ... nunc Latio [sic] transscripta a Iacobo Grutero ... [with:] Novus atlas, opus imperfectum, Latine conscriptum ... cum praefatione W. Rawley.
Elzevir edition of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis, translated into Latin by Jacobus Gruterus and William Rawley (Bacon’s chaplain and amanuensis), with numerous annotations.
Both works first appeared, shortly after Bacon’s death, in 1626. The Sylva Sylvarum is ‘a vast compilation of one thousand paragraphs consisting of extracts from many books and Bacon’s own experiments and observations’ (ODNB), while the utopian New Atlantis provides a description of an island society and its scientific community, known as Salomon’s House.
Our seventeenth-century annotator was apparently a natural philosopher like Bacon. His marginalia to the Sylva Sylvarum encompass a broad range of topics including the colour of bird feathers, motion, rhubarb, fire, flatulence, heat and cold, spirits and essences, trees, disease, and salamanders. There are numerous additions to the subject index, and references to authors from Democritus to Fenelon. The annotations (in the same hand) to the New Atlantis contain cross references to Plato and John Heydon, as well as to other works by Bacon.
Gibson, Francis Bacon: a bibliography 185a; USTC 1032984.