BLAIR, Patrick. Botanick essays: in two parts … with many curious remarks, and several discoveries and improvements: adorn'd with figures

BLAIR, Patrick. Botanick essays: in two parts … with many curious remarks, and several discoveries and improvements: adorn'd with figuresBLAIR, Patrick. Botanick essays: in two parts with many curious remarks, and several discoveries and improvements: adorn'd with figures London: Printed by W. and J. Innys. 1720. 8vo. Contemporary full calf, double blind fillets and panels to sides, spine with raised bands and brown morocco gilt lettering piece to second compartment; pp. [36], 414, [2], 5 leaves of plates; hinges tender, extremities rubbed. First edition. The Royal Society granted

BLAIR, Patrick. Botanick essays: in two parts … with many curious remarks, and several discoveries and improvements: adorn'd with figures London: Printed by W. and J. Innys. 1720.

8vo. Contemporary full calf, double blind fillets and panels to sides, spine with raised bands and brown morocco gilt lettering piece to second compartment; pp. [36], 414, [2], 5 leaves of plates; hinges tender, extremities rubbed.

First edition. The Royal Society granted Blair licence to publish the book on 22 October 1719 when Sir Isaac Newton, the dedicatee, was President, hence his name on the imprimatur leaf. It was probably published in late 1719  although the title page bears the date 1720.

Blair had much to be grateful to the Royal Society for. It was due to a petition from Hans Sloane and other Fellows that he was spared the death penalty after being captured as part of the Jacobite army that was defeated at the Battle of Preston in 1716. The Society's inter vention was due to Blair's extraordinary abilities as a naturalist. Born possibly in Dundee at some time around 1670 - accounts differ –- he trained as a surgeon and served with the British Army before returning home in 1702. He made his name by dissecting an elephant that died while in Dundee as part of atouring show in 1706. The resulting paper  Osteographica Elephantina was published in two parts in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1710. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1712.

After his release from jail, Blair and his family resettled in Boston, Lincolnshire. While still practising as a surgeon, he concentrated on botany, particularly plant sexuality, and produced this work, his best-known book and an important contribution to  pre-Linnean natural science. It represents a pioneering work on plant reproduction and an object lesson in the scientific method. Other botanists were able to reproduce Blair's experimental results and his feelings of personal vindication after a rough few years are shown in his letter to Hans Sloane of 31 December 1721: "Honoured Sir, It is no small Satisfaction, that what I advanced in my Botanick Essays is now so fully confirm'd by Experiments made by some curious Gardeners…" ( Phil. Trans. R. Soc. (1721) 31 (369): 216–221 . )   It is "[a] most outstanding work...  Pulteney [in his Historical and biographical sketches of the progress of botany in England, 1790] considered that the publication of Botanick essays, in which Blair expounded the then new view as to the sexual characters of plants, contributed greatly to the extension of the knowledge and the confirmation of the truth of this matter in England" (Henrey II, p.48).

ESTC T81025; Henrey 456.

SKU: 2124909