First edition. Written by the polymathematical lawyer, politician, and writer Roger North (1653-1734), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds was based on the author’s own experience, gained at his estate in Rougham, Norfolk. North had a very practical disposition, was a skilled mathematician and friend of Sir Christopher Wren, and had designed his own house at Rougham, and the experience he gained is recorded in this volume ‘for the benefit of his posterity and neighbours’, who may wish ‘to divert themselves with the most reasonable employment of beautifying and improving their own estates’ (A2v). As the title-page states, the twenty chapters which comprise the work are gathered into six sections, which are titled: ‘Of the Situation and Disposition of the Principal Waters’; ‘The Manner of Making and Raising Pond-Heads, with their Dimensions, and how to Secure the Banks’; ‘Of Sluices, Stews, Moats, Auxiliary Waters, and the Course of Laying the Great Waters Dry’; ‘Of the Breeding and Feeding of Fish, and the Manner of Stocking Waters’; ‘Of Disposing of Fish, of the Management for Carriage, of Nusances to Ponds and Fish, of Frosts, and the Ways to Save the Fish in them’; and ‘Of the Benefits and Improvements by Fish’. The work appears to have been popular, and further editions appeared in 1714 (a reissue of the first with a reset title and an errata leaf), 1715 (‘second edition’), and 1726 (a reissue of the second edition).

With mathematics, music ‘was North’s dominant passion and one which he pursued all his life. […] North was interested not only in performance. His many manuscript treatises on music and their preliminary essays deal with both the science and the art of music. Kassler points out how North’s writings on music are innovative: in his attempts to understand the production of sound in wind instruments; in his elaboration of a “physics of beauty”; in his development of “a theory of harmony as individual chords that function in relation to a chord root and within a key”; and in his theory of the origins and history of music’ (ODNB). As such, North’s writings were a valuable and important resource for the music of the period, which Christopher Hogwood drew upon in his work.

ESTC T81654; J.C. Kassler, The Honourable Roger North (1651-1734) (Farnham: 2009), p. 380; Kress, 2864; Westwood and Satchell, p. 157.