Lot No VAT on hammer price or buyer's premium. Augsburg: ad insigne pinus, 5 January Pine tree device on title, folding engraved plate by Alexander Mair, one full-page engraving in text. Correction slip signed Apelles between quires A and B. Plate with old repair to verso, 55mm. Old vellum, later manuscript title on spine recased, new endpapers, covers bowed, cockling to endpapers.
Provenance : erased shelf marks and small indistinct ownership stamp on title. Having been appointed professor of Hebrew and mathematics at Ingolstadt the previous year, Scheiner constructed his own telescope and with it detected the remarkable phenomenon of spots on the sun in March He believed that the spots were small planets circling the sun but, as a Jesuit, he was unable to publish this overwhelming evidence in support of Copernicanism under his own name; instead he communicated the discovery to his friend Marcus Welser in Augsburg.
They occasioned Galileo's Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle machie solari e loro accidenti Rome, in the form of three letters to Welser, arguing that the spots were actually on the rotating sun and not tiny satellites of it; in the domestic issue, Scheiner's letters were even printed at the conclusion of Gaileo's work under his pseudonym of Apelles.
Despite the differences in interpretation, enlivened by the dispute over priority, the same telescopic evidence had persuaded both astronomers of the correctness of the Copernican system.
VD17 only locates three copies at Munich, Wolfenbuttel and Leipzig. RBH records only one sale in Brought to you by. Robert Tyrwhitt. View All.
