Principles of Zoology, Part I, Comparative Physiology (William H. Brewer's copy as a Yale student, with his signature)
Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1848. First edition. Hardcover. A nice association copy, with the ownership signature of William Henry Brewer on the front free endpaper and his location and date, "Analty. Labs. New Haven. June 28th 1850." Brewer published no books in his lifetime, thus his signature is scarce. He is best known as the the chief botanist of the California Division of Mines and Geology (today's California Geological Survey), which took him into the field for four years, as chronicled in his posthumous classic, Up and Down California in 1860-1864 (see our copy). He was handpicked by Josiah Whitney for the role. He later became the Chair of Agriculture at Yale's Sheffield Scientic School, and he took part in the famous Harriman Expedition to Alaska. His signature here predates these successes, though, and was penned when he was just 22 and himself a student in the Yale Analytical Labs which would become the Sheffield Scientific School. He began his studies there in 1848. Thus this copy was truly his textbook and undoubtedly influential in his career. Read more about Brewer in the biography that accompanies his papers at Yale. Agassiz is cross-referenced as a subject in those papers, but it's unclear if Brewer's papers hold correspondence between them; seems likely, and Brewer spent time in Cambridge with Asa Gray and Josiah Whitney and probably would have associated also with Agassiz.
The front free endpaper also holds the Yale bookplate of Georgiana Baxter (later Georgiana Baxter Deevy) and her stamp is on the pastedown. Baxter was herself an interesting figure and early woman in American biology, earning her doctorate from Yale in 1939 with a thesis on tarantulas, studying marine zooplankton at Woods Hole, returning to Yale as a research associate for 21 years, and ultimately becoming the curator of biological oceanography at the Florida State Museum at the University of Florida (her biography gleaned from this posthumous paper).
Principles of Zoology was Agassiz's first book published in America and it became a foundational textbook, with many editions published. A Part II was intended, but it did not come to fruition, as his wife and biographer, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, explains in Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence: "[Principles of Zoology, Part I] had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of the second, which was never printed. Agassiz was always swept along so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he never found the time." As the preface states, "the design of this work is to furnish an epitome of the leading principles of the science of Zoology ... so illustrated as to be intelligible to the beginning student. No similar treatise now exists in this country, and indeed some fo the topics have not been touched upon in the language." See our photos of the title pages for the array of topics covered. Agassiz and Gould tour the reader through comparative anatomy, physiology, and classification, and arrive at a discussion of "natural arrangement" that supports a creationist view that animal branches are divine rather that evolutionary. As this biography puts its, "The cornerstone of Agassiz's biological thought was his belief that the gradation from low to high forms, in any taxon, paralleled the order of appearance in the fossil record, the order of stages in the organisms' development, and the distribution and ecology of the taxon." Agassiz famously did not come around to Darwin's theory and was his primary foil in America, with Asa Gray, his Harvard colleague in botany, Darwin's great champion. The frontispiece diagram of the book shows their theory of animal lineages (taxa) through time as represented by fossils in the earth, or as his contemporary Arnold Guyot observed, "The whole plan of the present animal kingdom in its relations to the extinct paleontological forms."
Agassiz was Swiss-born and studied with George Cuvier and Alexander van Humboldt in Paris and is best known for his study of fish and the founding of glaciology, as he was keenly interested in the evidence of continent-wide and then global glaciation. He is considered a "founding father" of the American science both through his work at Harvard and his founding role in the National Academy of Sciences, and he arguably was the most famous/popular scientist in America when he died in 1873. Among those he trained are Alpheus Hyatt, William Healey Dall, David Starr Jordan, Nathaniel Shaler, and Edward S. Morse.
A large duodecimo in the publisher's purple or maroon embossed boards with gilt lettering stamped to spine. With the frontispiece and interior inset illustrations. Index and publisher's ads at rear. Very good with the spine and upper board edges sunned to tan and the front board cracked through at top for two inches, but holding firm otherwise. A few marginal pencil lines in the interior and at least one annotation in Brewer's hand where he has crossed out "Analogy" and written "Affinity" in his tiny cursive script on page 6. A handsome volume, a foundational text in American science, and a layered Yale association . Good. Item #2201
Price: $4,750.00 save 5% $4,512.50