WOODWARD, John. 
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Physicalische Erd - Beschreibung oder Versuch einer natürlichen Historie des Erdbodens, welchem zugleich die von dem berühmten E(lias). Camerario dagegen gemachten Einwürffe; wie auch des B. Halloway Einleitung zu des Auctoris Beantwortung dieser Einwürffe, und des Auctoris Beantwortung selbst ... ingleichen verschiedene über diese Materie gewechselte Briefe, nebst Dessen richtiger und ordentlicher Eintheilung der Fossilien, beygefügt sind. Aus der Englischen in das Frantzösische, und nunmehro in die Teutsche Sprache übersetzt. 8 parts in 1 Vol.- Erfurt: Johann Friedrich Weber, 1744 - 1746. 8vo. (175 x 115 mm). 18 Bll., 120 pp., 1 Bl., pp. 121 - 806, 47 Bll. With a folded frontispiece. Contemporary leather binding over thin wooden boards with gilt edges and raised bands; rubbed, with worming on boards, joints, and lower spine. Evenly slightly browned, occasional underlining and notes in pencil, with small moisture stains in places on the upper outer corner. Parts 1–2 and 3–8 each have their own title pages, most of which are paginated. The Letters (pp. 719 – 806) include, among other things, Woodward’s letters to Newton.
Exceedingly rare first German edition of An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth, probably translated after the French edition of 1735 which contains translations of three books, all authored by the English physician, geologist & mineralogist John Woodward (1665 - 1728). These are: Woodward's "Essay," translated from the third English edition of 1723; Woodward’s reply to the German physician Elias Camerarius' (1673-1734) objections, made from Holloway's 1726 English translation titled: "The Natural History of the Earth, illustrated, enlarged, and defended" and a translation of "Fossils of all kinds," from which the author's preface and the plates have been omitted. John Woodward, an English geologist and fossil collector, was an early believer in the organic origin of fossils (first proposed by Steno and Hooke around 1668), but he was initially at a loss to explain how fossils became embedded in the earth's crust, if they were the remains of living animals on the surface. And then he got his Big Idea. What if, during the Great Flood of Noah, God had miraculously suspended gravity (by which Woodward meant not Newtonian gravity, but the force of cohesion that holds things together) ? As the earth's rocks dissolved into thick pudding, all the drowned animals and planets would sink down until their density was equaled by that of the surrounding muck. When gravity returned, the rocks would cohere again, with the animals remains now imprisoned as fossils within. It was actually a clever idea, except for the density part, which would suggest that the top layers of rock should contain all the jellyfish and the bottom layers all the turtles. Woodward announced his hypothesis in An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth, which took its place as an early offering in a long-running genre known as "Theories of the Earth.“ Provenance: Karl Haberstock, Berlin; von Dultz, München; Ex-libris of the Swiss natural scientist Emil Bächler (1868 – 1950). Endpaper with handwritten table of contents, likely in his own hand. VD 18 90637836 (nur bis Tl. 5); vgl. DSB XIV, 502 (EA); Jahn. Bibliographical history of John Woodward, 198 - 199; Eyles, V.A. John Woodward, F.R.S., F.R.C.P., M.D. (1665 - 1728): a bio-bibliographical account of his life and work, in: Journal for the Society of the Bibliography of Natural History, 5, (1971), no. 6, 399 - 427. ( Geologie, Fossilien, Mineralogie, Earth theory, Anthropocene, wunderkammer, Zeit, Evolution )
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Sachgebiete: Geologie, Mineralogie, Naturwissenschaften, Paläontologie , Wissenschaftsgeschichte
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