Women and Science
(Brenner, Sydney) Douarin, Nicole le | Dans le Secret des Êtres Vivants
£250.00
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First edition, first impression, paperback issue. Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sydney Brenner on the half title, “It has been great to have the chance to know you. Thanks to Gulbenkian! With my admiration and my sincére amitié, these pages about my life in science. Paris, le 26 Juillet 2012, Nicole le Douarin”. Gulbenkian probably refers to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a philanthropic organisation which may have held a conference or other event at which Douarin and Brenner met.
Recipient Sydney Brenner (1927 - ) has been a leader in the field of genetics almost from the moment he received his doctorate at Oxford in 1954. He joined Francis Crick’s laboratory in 1956, and they did groundbreaking research on how DNA is decoded by cells. Brenner proposed that the nucleotides which comprise DNA (adenine, guanine, thiamine and cytosine) are read by the cell in sets of three called codons, with each codon representing an amino acid (for example, three adenines in a row is the codon for the amino acid lysine). A gene is simply a string of codons that directs the production of a protein molecule from individual amino acids. He also correctly predicted the existence of messenger RNA, the molecule that carries the genetic code from the nucleus to the ribosomes, where the translation process occurs.
Following this work, it was Brenner’s efforts to establish a new laboratory organism for the study of genetics that led to his Nobel Prize. “Beginning in 1965, he began to lay the groundwork to make C. elegans, a small, transparent nematode, into a major model organism for genetics, neurobiology and developmental biology research. As a direct result of his original vision, this tiny worm became the first animal for which the complete cell lineage and entire neuronal wiring were known. Today, more than 1,000 investigators are studying C. elegans, and Brenner’s work was further honored when a closely related nematode was named Caenorhabditis brenneri” (Salk Institute biography).
Author Nicole le Douarin (1930 - ) is a leader in the field of developmental biology. She has designed important techniques for studying differentiation in embryos, most importantly the creation of chimeras in which cells from two different species can be individually tracked as they develop into organ systems. Crucially, she used this technique to elucidate the early development of the nervous and immune systems. Douarin has recieved numerous accolades for her work. “In 1988 she was only the third woman in 500 years to be admitted as a member of the College de France. In 1989 she was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Science and in 1990 as a fellow of the Royal Society. She also received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1990 and in 1991 she became an officer of the Légion d’Honneur. In 1993 she received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. She is an honorary fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2002) and was the first recipient of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize for women in science and biology (2004)” (The Embryo Project Encyclopedia).
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...Itinéraire d'une Biologiste. Péreface de Mona Ozouf et Michelle Perrot.
Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012.
Pefect bound. Original white wrappers printed in blue and black. With the publisher’s wraparound band. Minor bump to head of spine. An excellent, fresh copy.
(Stopes, Marie C.) Eaton, Peter & Marilyn Warnick | Marie Stopes. A Checklist of Her Writings.
£35.00
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First edition, first impression of the key bibliography of Stopes’ phenomenal literary output, encompassing not only her family planning and scientific publications, but also poetry, plays, translations and travel writing, fairy tales, and her only novel.
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London: Croom Helm, 1977.
Octavo. Original black boards, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. An excellent copy in the lightly rubbed an toned jacket with a few small marks and spots.
Abercrombie, John | Culture and Discipline of the Mind
£45.00
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The title page states that this is the fifth edition, however, we have been unable to trace any earlier editions in the usual institutional catalogues.
This small book on moral intelligence contains the ownership inscription of a young woman, Anne Elizabeth Le Mesurier, most likely the same Anne Elizabeth who genealogical records indicate was born to Thomas and Margaret Le Mesurier in 1814. Books on morality were an important part of the education of most middle and upper-class young people during the 19th-century. This text, however, seems directed more towards boys and men, with a focus on mental and emotional discipline, intellectual life, and masculine character development rather than virtues then considered feminine, such as modesty and care-giving. It is therefore interesting to see that it was first owned by a woman (she has dated her ownership inscription in the year of publication), and it would be interesting to compare it to other didactic and moral books known to have been owned by women during this period.
The text itself was written by Edinburgh's leading physician, John Abercrombie (1780-1844). "His meticulous case records were to form the basis for two important books published in 1828, both of which received wide acclaim.... His abilities were recognised by his appointment by King George IV as physician in ordinary to the King in Scotland, the first such appointment. The University of Oxford conferred on him the award of the honorary degree of MD. The prestige of this honour can be judged by the fact that the only other recipient in the previous 50 years was Dr Edward Jenner of vaccination fame" (Notable Fellows of the College of Physicians of Edinburgh profile). Abercrombie was also a noted philanthropist and the author of a number of other philosophical and religious works.
- Addressed to the Young. Fifth Edition. Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co., 1837. Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine gilt. Contemporary ownership inscription to front pastedown. Cloth partially faded and a little rubbed, with small worn spots at the ends of the spine and corners, just a little light spotting to contents. A very good copy.
Aikin, John | The Calendar of Nature
£350.00
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Third edition of this charming little book on the changing of the seasons from month to month by the “physician and man of letters” John Aiken (1747-1822) (Hahn, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature).
Aiken charming combines practical knowledge of nature and gardening with literary references. For April he writes: “This month gives the most perfect image of Spring; for its vicissitudes of warm gleams of sunshine, and gentle showers, have the most wonderful effects in hastening that universal springing of the vegetable tribes, from whence the season derives its appellation. April generally begins with raw unpleasant weather, the influence of the equinoctial storms still in some degree prevailing, Its opening is thus described in a poem of Mr. Warton’s: ‘Mindful of disaster past, And thinking of the northern blast, The fleety storm returning still, The morning hoar; the evening chill; Reluctant comes the timid Spring...’ Early in the month, that welcome guest and harbinger of Summer, the swallow, returns. The kind first seen, is the chimney, or house, swallow, known by its long forked tail, and red breast. At first, here and there, only one appears, glancing quick by us, as if scarcely able to endure the cold. ‘The swallow for a moment seen, Skims in haste the village green’.”
A very nice copy in an attractive contemporary tree calf binding. With the ownership inscription and notes of a woman, Eliza Davenport, who obtained this copy in 1810. Davenport’s short pencilled notes at the rear of the volume relate to a handful of observations of flowering plants and other phenomena.
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...Designed for the Instruction and Entertainment of Young Persons. The Third Edition. London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.
Duodecimo (155 x 95mm). Contemporary tree calf, spine gilt in compartments, marbled endpapers. 1810 ownership inscription to the verso of the front free endpaper, pencilled notes of a similar date to the verso of the rear blank. Binding lightly rubbed at the extremities, the corner of B6 torn, not affecting the text, light spotting to the contents. Very good condition.
Applin, Esther Richards, Alva E. Ellisor & Hedwig T. Kniker | "Subsurface Stratigraphy of the Coastal Plain of Texas and Louisiana"
£45.00
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Offprint of the paper proving that microfossils could be used to date the layers of the Earth’s crust, a key insight of modern geology.
Author Esther Richards Applin (1895-1972) was an petroleum geologist at the Rio Bravo Oil Company. “In a paper presented at a Geological Society meeting in 1921 by her supervisor at Rio Bravo, Applin suggested that microfossils could be used to date strata. She was ridiculed by more experienced geologists for her audacity... To verify her claim, Applin worked with Alva Ellisor and Hedwig Kniker to find ways to separate the fossils from the matrix of the cuttings. In 1925, the three coauthored a paper that detailed the sequences and oil-bearing zones in the Gulf Coast using microfossils” (Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science p. 46).
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...reprinted for private circulation from Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Vol. 9, No. 1, January-February 1925. [Tulsa, OK]: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1925.
44 page offprint. Original tan wrappers printed in black. 1 plate, 1 illustration within the text. Library ticket to the base of the spine and both wrappers, sticker, security label, and “discard” ink stamp to rear blank, security sticker to the final page of the text, library ink stamp to the title. Some pencilled notes to the upper wrapper and title. Corners and gutter creased, minor creasing of the upper wrapper from the top left to the lower right. Good condition.
Bacon, Gertrude | Memories of Land and Sky
£350.00
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First edition of the memoirs of the first Englishwoman to fly. Inscribed by the author, using her married name, on the title page, “(Gertrude Foggitt) – Sept. 1936”.
Gertrude Bacon (1874-1949) was the daughter of the scientist and balloonist Rev. John Maczenzie Bacon, and she accompanied him on most of his expeditions. "Bacon became fascinated by flying and as a journalist reported on the various airships and planes being built." In August 1904 she became the first woman to fly in an airship, being a passenger in the near-disastrous first flight of an 84-foot-long ship designed by Stanley Spencer. "From 22 to 29 August, 1909, the world's first aviation meeting was held at Rheims, France. Bacon was determined to go for a ride in one of the new machines. On the last day she was taken up in a Farman plane, squeezed between the radiator and the pilot. She described the takeoff: 'The motion was wonderfully smooth - smoother yet - and then - ! Suddenly there had come into it a new indescribable quality - a lift - a lightness - a life!' Thus she became the first Englishwoman to fly" (International Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary, p. 15). Bacon flew on several other occasions, and became the first ever hydroplane passenger at Lake Windermere in 1912. Bacon became Gertrude Foggitt in 1929, when she married fellow botanist and chemist Thomas Jackson Foggitt.
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...With Twenty-Four Illustrations. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1928.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt and to upper board in blind. 8-page publisher’s ads at rear. Portrait frontispiece and 15 plates from black and white photographs. Spine cocked, cloth a little rubbed at the extremities, two shallow dents in the upper board, lower corner bumped, some spotting to the contents, particularly the early leaves, and edges of the text block. Very good condition.
Bonnevie, Kristine | "Chromosomenstudien III
£250.00
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Offprint, presentation copy inscribed by the author on the upper wrapper, “Schrader, with kind regards of the author”.
Cell biologist Kristine Bonnevie (1872-1949) was Norway’s first female professor and the first woman member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. She studied with chromosome researcher Theodor Boveri in Germany, and was awarded a PhD in 1906 for her study of sex cells. “The problem of chromosome halving in the sex cells was not well understood at the time, and her work challenged the classic work of the Norwegian cytologists Alette and Kristian Emil Schreiner. In response to criticism by the Schreiners about her chromosomal work, Bonnevie went to Columbia University where she worked on sex chromosomes in the sea snake, under E. B. Wilson, verifying her earlier work... In 1908, she extended her work to non-dividing chromosomes in related organisms. She continued work on mitosis even after she gave up other work in cytology (Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science).” On Bonnevie’s return to Norway she became a professor of zoology at the University of Oslo (then Christiana) and did significant work on human genetic diseases and fingerprint patterns. “By 1949, almost every Norwegian cytologist had been trained by her” (BDWS). Bonnevie received a number of awards for her social and political work, including being made St. Olaf knight, First Class, for organising deliveries of food to the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War.
The subject of this paper is the maturation of chromatin in the chromosomes of the common onion, chromatin being the cellular material that packages the usually-loose DNA into dense chromosomes in preparation for cell division. The recipient is uncertain, but may have been the prominent chromosome researcher Franz Schrader (1891-1962) or his wife, Sally, also a cytologist in her own right (1895-1984). Franz Schrader was a generation younger than Bonnevie, but it’s possible that this offprint was sent to him sometime after publication, perhaps as part of correspondence between the two scientists. Schrader was certainly well aware of Bonnevie’s work, and in 1935 cited her in the first paragraph of his paper “Notes on the Mitotic Behaviour of Long Chromosomes” in the journal Cytologia.
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...Chromatinreifung in Allium cepa. Mit 4 Tafeln." Offprint from The Archiv for Zellforschung volume 6, number 2.
Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1911.
Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. 4 plates of which 1 is folding and the others are double-page. Ownership signature “Ric” and short note on the upper wrapper. Wrappers a little toned at the extremities, lightly rubbed, lower corner bumped, contents faintly toned. A very good copy.
Boole, Mary Everest | The Mathematical Psychology of Gatry and Boole
£175.00
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First edition, first printing.
Author Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916) was the daughter of a rector who encouraged her interest in mathematics. At eighteen the logician George Boole became her tutor, and she wrote later that it was his book on logic which made her fall in love with him. In 1855 they were married and moved to Cork, where he was teaching. George encouraged Mary “to attend his lectures and improve her knowledge of mathematics. He read his book on differential equations to her, altering it until the language was completely clear to her” (Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science).
Following George’s death, Mary became a matron at Queens College and developed an interested in mathematical education. “Her collected works, published after her death in 1931, reprinted interesting articles on mathematical education that include the idea that a child should construct mathematical table before he or she uses it, and emphasize the need for logical thinking” (BDWS). The present volume is “a detailed analysis of the philosophical writings of the French writer P. Gratry (whom George Boole had admired), comparing them with her husband’s mathematical concepts which she tried (not entirely successfully) to explain using simple geometric concepts. This book also tried to investigate what she termed ‘mathematical psychology’, the importance of logical thinking, and the nature of genius” (BDWS). -
...Translated from the Language of the Higher Calculus and into that of Elementary Geometry.
London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., 1897.
Octavo. Original brown cloth, titles to spine gilt, black coated endpapers. Lightly rubbed at the extremities, spine a little rolled and darkened with some minor wear at the ends, contents slightly toned. A very good copy.
Bowman, Martie | Calendar for 1936 depicting pilot Martie Bowman in her WACO INF biplane.
£450.00
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A remarkable piece of early aviation ephemera, this calendar was produced as a Christmas greeting by the early female aviator Marguerite (Martie) Bowman (1901-1985) and her husband Leslie, also a pilot. It depicts Bowman flying in her WACO INF biplane, registration number NC625Y, in formation with two others, and includes portraits of Bowman, her husband, and their daughter Larnie Bowman Allen. We have learned from one of the Bowmans’ grandchildren that Larnie joined the family profession, becoming a wing-walker at eight and soloing at twelve.
The Bowmans established an aviation business together and, during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Martie Bowman ferried planes from factories and regularly participated in air races. She competed in the 1930 Women’s Dixie Air Derby from Washington D. C. to Chicago, and won the Women’s International Air Derby of 1934 and the two-day women’s championship Shell Trophy Cup at Long Beach, California. In her biography of fellow pilot Phoebie Omlie, Janann Sherman recounts that during the Dixie Derby Bowman selflessly assisted Omlie, who had an injury, by waking up each hour during the night to apply medicated drops to her eyes (Sherman, Walking on Air, p. 65).
The Bowman’s papers are held at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and as of 2001 two of Martie Bowman’s planes were still registered as flight-worthy with the FAA.
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[Olympia, WA], 1935.
Silver gelatin composite photograph (250 x 200 mm) with small tear-off monthly calendar for 1936. Inscribed “Merry Christmas, The Bowmans”. A few minor nicks and spots at the edges. Excellent, unused condition.
Brazier, Mary A. B. | The Electrical Activity of the Nervous System
£150.00
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First edition, first impression. A beautiful copy and rare in such nice condition in the dust jacket.
Author Mary Brazier (1904-1995) was an internationally recognised neurophysiologist who also became a respected historian of science in later life. She was educated at Bedford College in London, and did important research on the nervous system, including electrical activity in thyroid disease, nerve injuries, “war neuroses”, and the effects of anaesthesia on the brain. Following the Second World War she worked with Norbert Weiner at MIT, where they developed an analog correlator to analyse EEG and other nerve potentials, then joined the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, where she continued pioneering the use of computers in neurology. “As editor of the important new journal in her field, she published an important bibliography of EEG publications ranging from 1875-1948... Her later work on the history of her field explored these early publications and extended back into the beginning of neurophysiology in the seventeenth century” (Ogilvie, pp. 174-175).
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...A Textbook for Students. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1951.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine and publisher’s roundel to upper board gilt. With the dust jacket. Diagrams, charts, and illustrations from photographs within the text. Ownership signature and ink stamp of Henry Guze on the front free endpaper. An excellent, fresh copy in the jacket that is very lightly rubbed with a few shallow scuffs affecting the upper panel.
Cadbury, Deborah | The Dinosaur Hunters
£45.00
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First edition, first impression of this well-received popular history of the discovery and scientific documentation of dinosaur fossils in Britain during the early 19th century, notable for its emphasis on the work of Mary Anning in addition to that of Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, and Richard Owen. Though Anning’s work as a fossil collector has been well-known to specialists and historians since the Victorian Era, this volume was an early part of the revival of popular interest in her life which began in 1999 at the 200th anniversary of her birth, and which has continued in recent years with novels and films, as well as an initiative to place a statue of her in Lyme Regis.
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...A Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.
Octavo. Original brown boards, titles to spine gilt, green endpapers. With the dust jacket. Illustrations throughout the text. Very slight indentation at the head of spine and shallow bump tot edge of the upper board, light spotting to the top edge of the text block. An excellent copy with the jacket, of which the lower edges of the inner flaps are slightly curled from being in a jacket protector.
Chinsamy-Turan, Anusuya | The Microstructure of Dinosaur Bone
£150.00
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First edition, first printing. A superb copy of the first book devoted solely to dinosaur bone histology.
Some of the earliest paleontological researchers, including Louis Agassiz and Gideon Mantell, studied the microscopic structure of fossilised bones, but it was not until the 1950s that “the systematic study of archosaur palaeohistology began in earnest with the pioneering studies of Enlow & Brown”, who showed that cellular structure was preserved intact in fossils and that it “contained a wealth of information regarding the evolution and function of skeletal tissues in extinct organisms”. This was followed in the 1970s by the work of Armand de Ricqlès, who posited that “palaeohistological features could be correlated with growth rates and thus could indirectly shed light on the thermal physiology of extinct organisms”, in other words, that the microstructures of bones could reveal whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded (Bailleul, et al. “Dinosaur Palaeohistology: Review, Trends, and New Avenues of Investigation”, PeerJ, September 2019, pp. 3-4).
Author Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan (1962 - ), of the University of Cape Town, was the first scientist to attempt reconstruction of a dinosaur growth curve based on the microstructure of its fossilised bones, and is today one of the world’s leading experts on dinosaur histology. She is the author of more than one hundred academic articles and four books, and has won numerous awards, including the Academy of Science of South Africa’s Gold Medal.
The Microstructure of Dinosaur Bones draws on Chinsamy-Turan’s extensive experience in this field. “In this well-written, well-edited volume, she concludes that bone microstructure does indicate how bone formed during growth, and it does provide information on how factors such as seasonality, ontogenetic age, and lifestyle adaptations affected its growth, but she also finds that speculations about physiology based on bone histology are just that: speculations... Chinsamy-Turan has done the scientific community a great service by pulling together the wealth of information about dinosaur bone microstructure, and interpreting that information clearly and logically. Starting with a clear explanation of the organization of bone tissue on a microstructural level and the changes in bone composition during fossilization, she moves on to a helpful overview of dinosaur phylogeny and an insightful explanation of modern approaches to the study of dinosaur bones. Detailed descriptions of bone biology and beautiful color plates of dinosaur bone histology make dinosaur osteology accessible to any biologist who is fascinated with the biology of dinosaurs, as well as to both professors and graduate students working in this field” (Spotila, “Bred in the Bone: Bone Microstructures Bring Dinosaurs to Life”, BioScience 56 (3), 2006).
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...Deciphering Biology with Fine-Scale Techniques. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine in silver. With the dust jacket. 4 double-sided plates from colour photographs, diagrams, charts, and illustrations from black and white photos throughout the text. Excellent condition, with just a single tiny bump to the edge of the upper board and a few small scratches to the dust jacket.
Clerke, Agnes M. | The Herschels and Modern Astronomy
£250.00
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First edition of this biographical work on the astronomers William, Caroline, and John Herschel by one of the “great popularisers of science of the Victorian period” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 270). Copies of The Herschels and Modern Astronomy are uncommon on the market, particularly in such a nice example of the publisher’s binding.
Agnes Mary Clerke was taught at home by her scholarly parents, and “by the age of eleven she had mastered Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy” (Ogilvie, p. 270). Settling in London in 1877, she pursued a career as a writer, producing a remarkable body of work. Clerke “possessed the rare ability to communicate clearly the complexities of scientific theory to a popular audience, while synthesising masses of astronomical information into a coherent whole for professional scientists, who had become so specialised that they could not see the larger connection between their work and other current discoveries in astronomy” (Ogilvie p. 270). Though she never held a position at a university or observatory, Clerke gained “partial admission” to the male-dominated word of astronomy. She had an extensive correspondence with other astronomers, was awarded the Actonian Prize by the Royal Institution, and in 1903 was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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New York: Macmillan & Co., 1895.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine and upper board gilt. Portrait frontispiece and 2 plates. Tiny bump to the edge of the upper board, very lightly rubbed at the tips, and what may be a tiny spot of dampstain affecting the extreme corner of the lower panel, light spotting to the edges of the text blocks and occasionally the contents. Very good condition, the cloth fresh.
Cotton, Lizzie E. | Bee Keeping for Profit
Sold Out
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RESERVED Second edition of this rare example of a commercial beekeeping work by a woman, first published in 1880.
Author Lizzie Cotton describes herself in the introduction as a professional apiarist “engaged in raising honey for market”, and this volume was published to advertise the “Controllable Hive”, which she invented, and the “New System of Bee Management” she developed for it. The hive was designed with separate glass boxes on the tops and sides for honeycomb production, and she claimed that her system provided regular feeding so that colonies survived the winter, prevented swarming, and increased honey production and profits. Cotton writes that she distrusted “patented” hive designs as often being swindles, and did not patent hers so that anyone could construct their own “for much cheaper than I furnish them”, though she was willing to sell a hive with two sample glass honey boxes for eight dollars, or with a full set of glass boxes for twelve.
It seems that there was much controversy about Cotton within the apiarist community. “Her name cropped up regularly in the Humbugs and Swindlers column in Bee Culture. People complained that their bees had swarmed, and they had not made a profit from their bees. Cotton also had a tendency to advertise a sale on her hives after the sale had already expired” (Horn, Beeconomy, p. 187). In a letter to bee culture in the 1886 a correspondent writes that a swarm he ordered from her was of high quality and producing well in a Controllable Hive. The editors respond that “We are very glad to get the above report... With the very large prices Mrs. Cotton charges for whatever she advertises, she certainly ought to give good measure and good quality, and we are very glad if she is beginning to do so” (Bee Culture, July 15, 1886, p. 588).
Cotton herself hits back in the introduction to this volume, writing that “Since the day I introduced my Controllable Hive and New System of Bee Management to the notice of the public, the worthless bee hive swindlers and their tools have been boiling over with wrath against me, lying and slandering me through the public journals, and especially through the Bee Journals, and all because, that I, a woman, had succeeded in inventing a bee hive and new system of bee management superior to anything yet produced, and which was fast coming into use on its merits, among bee keepers; and consequently the sale of other hives was decreasing in the same proportion.”
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...A New System of Bee Management. Second Edition. Illustrated. Price One Dollar. West Gorham, Maine: privately published, 1883.
Octavo. Original purple cloth with Greek key design blocked in blind to the boards. Engraved portrait frontispiece and illustrations throughout the text. Contemporary ownership inscription of Marcus J. James to the front pastedown. Cloth rubbed and marked with wear at the extremities, upper corner bumped, hinges cracked. Good condition.
Erdmann, Rhoda | Praktikum der Gewebepflege oder Explanation Besonders der Gewebezüchtung
£450.00
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First edition, first impression of “the first German textbook that provided detailed instructions on tissue culture methods and indicated how they might be applied for cancer research”, by the pioneering cytologist Rhoda Erdmann (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 424). Rare, with only one institutional copy listed in WorldCat, at the University of Groningen.
Erdmann (1870-1935) struggled throughout her career, despite being recognised by her peers as a talented and forward-looking researcher. Her father opposed science as a career, so she only pursued it following his death. After qualifying in 1907, she worked at the University of Munich and did experimental cell research at the Helgoland and Naples zoological stations for her dissertation. She then became a scientific assistant at the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases, but the poor pay forced her to undertake literary work on the side.
In 1913 the American Lorande Loss Woodruff announced his discovery that paramecium could reproduce asexually seemingly indefinitely. Erdmann had been studying “the importance of sexual reproduction for both nuclear division and death of single-celled organisms” and wrote requesting samples of his cultures (Ogilvie). Instead, her offered her a position a Yale, where she “solved a number of problems related to parthenogenesis. She also updated her techniques of tissue culture under Ross Harrison, head of the Osborn Laboratory at Yale, who had developed new methods of culturing nerve cells” (Ogilvie).
On her way back to Germany in 1914 Erdmann was held as an enemy alien in Britain until she was offered the position of lecturer at Yale by Harrison, “an extraordinary offer since the charter of the university had to be changed to admit her as a woman faculty member” (Ogilvie). With scientific independence and a good salary, this was a productive period in her career, but it came to an end in 1918 when rumours about her research were enflamed by anti-German sentiment. “She was forcibly removed from her position and accused of plotting to poison the New Haven drinking water, and of destroying American chickens with a chicken virus that would poison the brains of American soldiers. After four and a half months in detention in the Waverley House in New York (a prison for ‘wayward girls’), she was released following the intervention of Ross Harrison and American female friends who had paid five thousand dollars in fines… Erdmann’s health suffered for the rest of her life from the results of this incarceration” (Ogilvie).
On her return to Germany, Erdmann was rejected fifty times when applying for positions, but was finally hired by the Friederich-Williams University Institute for Cancer Research in Berlin. “It was a position without additional personnel and no funding for laboratory equipment. Nevertheless, Erdmann established the first German department for experimental cytology in two empty rooms… Initial research conditions were so bad that she figured she had lost the first four years for research” (Ogilvie). Erdmann was not appointed to a teaching teaching post until 1929, and her laboratory did not become a formal university institute until the following year. As late as 1927 she was earning a lower salary than her assistant. “Meanwhile both students and coworkers were attracted to the new field and the medical faculty recognized experimental cytology as an interdisciplinary science important to both medical biology and physiology. Erdmann supplied both fields with assistants well trained in cytology” (Ogilvie).
During this period she also founded an international journal for cell research which had editors and contributors from as far away as Japan, and covered “every branch of cytology, including biochemistry, cell physiology, electrophysiology, and radiation biology. This was the only international scientific publication published by a woman. Erdmann also planned several international cell biology congresses, advertising them in the issues of the journal” (Ogilvie).
The final years of Erdmann’s life were blighted by the rise of the Nazis. She was jailed by the Gestapo for helping Jews escape Germany, and then lost her position under the “Aryan” laws of 1934. She died in Berlin the following year, having “promoted the importance of tissue culture studies in biology and cancer research in her lectures and scientific publications until her untimely death” (Ogilvie).
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...Mit 101 Textabbildungen. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922.
Octavo. Contemporary library binding of marbled boards with black cloth backstrip, titles to spine gilt. Illustrations from photographs throughout the text. Inked shelf number to the title, and ink stamps of the Leipzig Surgical Hospital to the title and 9 other leaves. Binding a little worn at the edges. Very good condition.
Fell, Honor B. | A Discussion on the Pericellular Environment and its Regulation in Vertebrate Tissues
£100.00
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First edition, first printing. The uncommon full issue of the journal containing fourteen papers read at a symposium on the intercellular environment in multicellular organisms, organised by prominent cell biologist Honor B. Fell (1900-1986). A very attractive and fresh copy in the original wrappers. As well as serving as the organiser of the symposium, Fell contributed the article, “The role of mucopolysaccharides in the protection of cartilage cells against the immune reaction”.
Fell’s childhood interest in animals and nature was encouraged by her parents, and she received what was at the time an unusually science-focused education. She earned four degrees at St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh, and then went to Cambridge “to learn a new technique pioneered by T. S. P. Strangeways in his research hospital. Tissues culture was a relatively new art at this time, and he had developed it to the extent that he could study the behavior of living cells on a warm stage. Fell was impressed, and when Strangeways offered her a job as scientific assistant with a grant from the Medical Research Council, she accepted.
Her first major study was on chick embryos, examining their cartilage and bones. This work culminated in her first important paper from the Strangeways in 1925, a study of the histogenesis of bone and cartilage in the long bone of embryonic chicks. From this beginning, she used techniques of organ culture to analyze the actions of various agents upon the cells of bone, cartilage, and associated tissues. The preliminary study was continued, and in 1926 she and Strangeways demonstrated that cartilage would not only grow but would differentiate in culture” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 440).
When Strangeways died in 1926 Fell was appointed director of the institute, a position she held for the next forty-one years, performing important research on vitamin A and rheumatoid arthritis, and producing research that led to the discovery of interleuken-1, an important agent of the immune system. Fell was made a fellow of the Royal Society and Dame Commander of the British Empire, and received honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Smith College.
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...Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B. Biological Sciences. Volume 271, Pages 233-410, Number 912. 17 July, 1975. London: The Royal Society, 1975.
Large octavo. Original light brown wrappers printed in black. 3 single and 9 double-sided plates from photomicrographs. Wrappers very lightly rubbed, narrow strip of fading at the top of the upper wrapper. Excellent condition.
Fell, Honor B. | The Histogenesis of Cartilage and Bone in the Long Bones of the Embryonic Fowl
£500.00
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First edition, first printing. The rare offprint of the first major work by prominent cell biologist Honor B. Fell (1900-1986). We can locate only one institutional copy of this offprint, at the University of Southern California.
Fell’s childhood interest in animals and nature was encouraged by her parents, and she received what was at the time an unusually science-focused education. She earned four degrees at St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh, and then went to Cambridge “to learn a new technique pioneered by T. S. P. Strangeways in his research hospital. Tissues culture was a relatively new art at this time, and he had developed it to the extent that he could study the behavior of living cells on a warm stage. Fell was impressed, and when Strangeways offered her a job as scientific assistant with a grant from the Medical Research Council, she accepted. Her first major study was on chick embryos, examining their cartilage and bones. This work culminated in her first important paper from the Strangeways in 1925, a study of the histogenesis of bone and cartilage in the long bone of embryonic chicks. From this beginning, she used techniques of organ culture to analyze the actions of various agents upon the cells of bone, cartilage, and associated tissues. The preliminary study was continued, and in 1926 she and Strangeways demonstrated that cartilage would not only grow but would differentiate in culture” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 440).
When Strangeways died in 1926 Fell was appointed director of the institute, a position she held for the next forty-one years, performing important research on vitamin A and rheumatoid arthritis, and producing research that led to the discovery of interleuken-1, an important agent of the immune system. Fell was made a fellow of the Royal Society and Dame Commander of the British Empire, and received honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Smith College.
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...[in] The Journal of Morphology and Physiology, Vol. 40, No. 3, Sept. 5, 1925. Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute Press, 1925.
Octavo. 44-page offprint, wire-stitched, original buff wrappers printed in black. 4 illustrations from photomicrographs within the text. Author’s name in black ink, “1925a” in red crayon, and ownership stamp of L. G. Dunn to the upper cover. Two-inch closed tear to the title not affecting text, staples rusted, a little light rubbing and some short nicks to the edges of the wrappers. Very good condition.
Fenn, Lady Ellenor | A Short History of Insects
Sold Out
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First and only edition of this rare work on entomology for children by the prolific educational author Lady Ellenor Fenn (1744-1815), who wrote under the pseudonyms Mrs. Teachwell and Mrs. Lovechild.
Fenn had no children of her own, but she and her husband, the antiquarian John Fenn, raised an orphan heiress and frequently looked after their nieces and nephews, for whom she began writing, illustrating, and binding manuscripts. She was influenced by Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778), and her early works were on manners, though she branched out to other non-fiction topics. “Her most famous title, Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1783–4), contained dialogues for teaching reading. A copy was received in the royal nursery, and it went through many editions in Britain and America until the 1870s. Ellenor was particularly interested in educating girls, and many titles were issued in the series Mrs Teachwell's Library for Young Ladies” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
The preface to this volume opens with the observation that, "Natural History seems likely to become the amuseument of our Wives and Children; but the enormous expence of books on that subject; and other reasons still more cogent, point out the expedience of an epitome for the use of Ladies and Young Persons”. She also focused on mothers, writing book and producing games and other educational material to assist them in teaching material that they may not have had the opportunity to learn in their own youth.
This volume is also connected with the Leverian Museum, being a “pocket companion” to the collection that was built over many years by Sir Ashton Lever and was particularly rich in natural history specimens, as well as material from the Cook expeditions. The Museum was exhibited in Leicester Square between 1775 and 1786 (and was purchased by the physician James Parkinson in 1784), then for another twenty years across the Thames at the Blackfriars Rotunda. Fenn wrote another book based on its contents, on quadrupeds, published in 1792.
Fenn “realized the importance of pictures as an aid to learning and published several volumes of woodcuts for children, and seems to have maintained a close practical contact with her publisher in the layout and production of her works, which contain large types with wide margins.” This volume includes eight attractive, hand-coloured plates by the Suffolk engraver George Quinton (1776-1851).
“Ellenor Fenn's works were popular and well reviewed in her day and regularly reprinted until the 1860s. However, her formulaic output, her disapproval of imaginative stories, her insistence on class distinctions, and her determination 'to correct some of the foibles incident to girls' (Mrs Teachwell, Female Guardian, title-page) have not endeared her to twentieth-century critics... Yet she had humour and realized that the educational process must be enjoyable to both adult and child. Above all she had the gift of communicating with children at their own level” (ODNB).
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...(Extracted from Works of Credit) Designed as an Introduction to the Study of that Branch of Natural History, and as a Pocket Companion to those who Visit the Leverian Museum. Norwich: Stevenson and Matchett, et al., 1797.
Duodecimo in sixes (185 x 110 mm). Original paste boards, recently rebacked to style with paper, new paper title label Hand-coloured, engraved frontispiece and 7 plates of which 3 are folding, by G, Quinton. Ownership initials to front free endpaper and monogram bookplate. Rebacked, as noted. Boards worn and dulled, lower corner knocked, contents clean. A very good copy.
Gowing, Margaret | Britain and Atomic Energy
£650.00
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RESERVED First editions, first impressions. The complete set of this important work by the foremost historian of Britain’s nuclear policy, together with the uncommon guide to the unpublished government papers cited in the first book, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. Rare in such nice condition.
Margaret Gowing (1921-1998) “was at once a distinguished historian and a redoubtable champion of a variety of causes that reflected her keen perception of what constituted the public interest. Her scholarly reputation rested primarily on her magisterial studies of atomic energy in Britain during and after the Second World War” (obituary in the Independent, November 20, 1998).
Gowing took a First in economic history at the London School of Economics in 1941, then held posts at the Ministry of Supply and Board of Trade, followed by the Cabinet Office, where she spent fourteen years as part of the team producing civil histories of the Second World War. In 1959 she joined the Atomic Energy Authority as historian and archivist.
“In Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (1964) and its two-volume sequel, Independence and Deterrence (1974, written with the assistance of her friend and collaborator Lorna Arnold), she offered a characteristically clear-eyed account of the fashioning and implementation of British policy with regard to atomic energy from the outbreak of the war until October 1952, when "Hurricane" - the test of a rather primitive bomb at Monte Bello, a group of islands off the north-west coast of Australia - propelled Britain to the status of the world's third nuclear power.
These books, along with her many articles, major public lectures, and penetrating reviews, established her not merely as a peerless chronicler and analyst of a crucial facet of the war effort and of Britain's subsequent struggles to maintain great power status, but also as a leading commentator on the relations between science and government. Her election first to the British Academy in 1975 and 13 years later to the Royal Society recognised equally the quality and the breadth of her work and placed her, with Sir Karl Popper and Joseph Needham, among the tiny handful of those who have been Fellows of both bodies” (the Independent).
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Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 [together with] Britain and Atomic Energy: Independence and Deterrence 1945-1952, volume I Policy Making, and volume II Policy Execution [and] References to Official Papers, July 1980. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. & the Authority Historian’s Office, 1964, 1974 & 1980.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945: Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine in copper on black ground and in gilt. With the dust jacket that is price-clipped and has contemporary Macmillan price tickets to the front flap. Cloth only very lightly rubbed at the extremities, a little spotting to the top edge of the text block, minor creasing to the lower corner of the prefatory leaves. An excellent, fresh copy in the price-clipped jacket that is a little rubbed, toned, and creased along the edges.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945: References to Official Papers: 32-page photocopied pamphlet, wire-stitched, in green wrappers printed in black. Fine condition.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-1952: Independence and Deterrence, volume I: Original dark blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, blue endpapers and top edge. Corners bumped, spine slightly rolled, short closed tears affecting the margin of pages 97-100. An excellent copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the edges.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-1952: Independence and Deterrence, volume 2: Original dark blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, blue endpapers and top edge. Corners bumped, spine slightly rolled. An excellent copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the edges. 4 double-sided plates from photographs in each of the three primary volumes.
Hassard, Annie | Floral Decorations for the Dwelling House
£250.00
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First edition, and a lovely copy, of this delightful work on flower arrangements and indoor plants that was highly praised by contemporaries.
By 1875, botanical pursuits such as flower and fern collecting, pressing, and arranging had been a major hobby for British women for at least a generation. Floral Decorations for the Dwelling House expanded on the work of earlier authors, such as A. E. Maling (Flowers for Ornament and Decoration, 1875), by adding advice on living plants in addition to cut flowers. It “offers a very detailed account, both practically and artistically oriented, of the best plants and best pieces of equipment to use for a wide variety of indoor plant and flower decorations, from bouquets to dining tables, window displays, hanging baskets and Christmas decorations, as well as giving advice on how best to arrange them” (Sparke, Nature Inside, p. 48).
The book was praised in the January 1876 issue of The Floral World and Garden Guide as “a systematic treatise on the subject. The truth is, the gifted author of this stands alone and far in advance of all competitors, whether as an exhibitor or a judge of exhibitions, whether in the preparation of a bouquet for a princess or the decoration of a grand saloon for an important public ceremony”. In that year an American edition was published by Macmillan, in which additional emphasis was placed on living plants in decorative schemes (Sparke).
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...A Practical Guide to the Home Arrangement of Plants and Flowers. With Numerous Illustrations. London: Macmillan & Co., 1875. Octavo. Original green cloth elaborately blocked in gilt and black with floral designs on the spine and upper board, brown coated endpapers. Burn & Co. binder’s ticket to the rear pastedown. 9 steel engraved plates, steel engravings throughout the text. Single leaf of ads at rear. Blind stamp of the W. H. Smith lending library to the front free endpaper. Cloth only very lightly rubbed at the extremities with a few small marks, a few light spots to the title. An excellent copy.
Hill, Justina | Germs and the Man
£100.00
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First edition, first printing, presentation copy inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Inscribed for Dr. G. A. C. Colston, from his long-time associate, Justine Hill, Baltimore, Mar 26, 1940”.
This work on disease-causing microbes was described as “the best popular presentation that had yet appeared” on the subject by psychiatrist Karl Menninger (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 601). Author Justina Hill (1893-?) attended Smith College and the University of Michigan, then served as a Red Cross worker, running a bacteriological laboratory in Spartanburg, South Carolina during the final two years of the First World War. She was then transferred with a Smith College unit to the Near East, where she ran a laboratory for five thousand refugees. “Upon returning to the United States, Hill was made an associate in bacteriology at the Brady Urological Institute and two years later an instructor in urology... She published numerous technical articles in medical journals as well as popular books on bacteriology” (Ogilvie). In 1942 she published Silent Enemies, on the communicable diseases of war, and in 1944 she contributed a piece in the Atlantic: “How Bad is the Flu? The possibility of recurrent epidemics, perhaps of increasing virulence, even of another pandemic, must be faced”.
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New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940.
Octavo. Original buff cloth, titles to spine and upper board blocked in green, decorative design blocked in brown, top edge dyed green. 8 double-sided plates. Light rubbing at the extremities, small bump to the edge of the lower board, small white spot to spine, slight abrasions and creasing to the edges of a few leaves, some light spotting to the plates. A very good copy.
Hyman, Libbie Henrietta | Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy
£20.00
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Second impression of the second edition of this classic textbook that was originally published in 1922. A battered copy that is of interest for the extensive notes and other signs of use by university students. The ownership inscriptions on the front free endpaper are “A. Graham Zool ‘48” and “Sydeny Rosen Meds 49”. The text is full of notes and underlining in multiple pencil colours and by different hands; some of the illustrations have been coloured in for study purposes; and material has also been taped in and loosely inserted, including a library card for the London Public Library belonging to the same Arthur Graham who signed the book.
The author of this textbook, Libbie Henrietta Hyman (1888-1969) developed her interest in natural science as a child and majored in zoology at the University of Chicago. “Encouraged by Mary Blount, a doctoral candidate who was in charge of the elementary zoology laboratory, Hyman took Charles Manning Child’s invertebrate zoology class during her senior year. So impressed was Child by her abilities that he suggested she attend graduate school. After she received her bachelor’s degree in zoology, she became Child’s graduate student. Hyman replaced Blount as the laboratory assistant in zoology and comparative vertebrate anatomy. this experience led her to write two very successful and financially remunerative laboratory manuals. The royalties on these early books made her financially independent” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 637).
Hyman continued in her role as laboratory assistant for sixteen years, then moved to New York City to pursue her goal of writing a major monograph on the invertebrates. The American Museum provided her with an office, laboratory, and library access, and she spent the next thirty years working on the multi-volume treatise, the last volume of which was published in 1967, while continuing to study and publish on all aspects of invertebrate biology. Hyman was also editor of the journal Systemic Zoology, vice president of the American Society of Zoologists, and president of the Society of Systematic Zoology, and received numerous honorary doctorates, two gold medals and the Daniel Giraud Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, April 1943.
Large octavo. Original buff cloth, titles to spine and upper board in red. Illustrations throughout the text. Ownership inscriptions to the front free endpaper, manuscript notes and underlining throughout, a few pieces of related material taped-in and loosely inserted, cloth rubbed, scratched, and marked, large gauge from the spine, which is also rolled, wear at the corners and spine ends. A good copy.
Klieneberger, Emmy | Über die Größe und Beschaffenheit der Zellkerne mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Systematik.
£45.00
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First edition, first impression of the doctoral dissertation of prominent bacteriologist Emmy Klieneberger-Nobel (1892-1985).
Klieneberger-Nobel’s doctorate was in botany, with mathematics and zoology as areas of special interest. This, her dissertation, is on the nature of cell nuclei. After graduation she worked part-time in the zoology laboratory at Goethe University and then found a position as a bacteriologist at the Hygiene Institute in Frankfurt. “Although she knew little about bacteriology when she began, by 1930 she had become a member of the German Society for Hygiene and Bacteriology and a member of the institute’s medical faculty” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 705).
After Hitler’s ascent, Klieneberger-Nobel emigrated to the UK, where she obtained two further degrees at London University joined the staff of the Lister Institute. Her main area of research were the mycoplasma, the genus of microbes which lacked a cell wall and were suspected to be an intermediate form of life between bacteria and viruses. “She discovered a variant, known as the ‘L-form’, which she named for the Lister Institute. Recognising that there were variants within the mycoplasma, Klieneberger-Nobel developed a medium to grow the mycoplasma that caused an unusual strain of bronchopneumonia in rodents. She found that after incubating for several days, colonies had grown that were similar to those of the well-known pleuropneumonia and agalactia. New morphological forms were found in dogs as well as rodents, and a saprophytic strain was found in sewage and soil” (Ogilvie, p. 705).
“Dr. Albert Sabin in the United States had a described a ‘rolling disease’ that resulted from toxoplasma infection of mouse brains. After Klieneberger-Nobel had written to Sabin, he sent her freeze-dried brains of infected mice. She successfulyl grew cultures from his samples in her special medium and shared her results with Sabin. Before her work could be published in the Lancet, Sabin published his results in Science, neglecting to mention Klieneberger-Nobel’s part in his results” (Ogilvie, p. 705). Klieneberger-Nobel identified several other mycoplasma diseases. She discovered that the rat disease polyarthritis was caused by mycoplasma in the animals’ joint fluid, and her work later led to the isolation of the human illness Mycoplasma pneummoniae.
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...Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der hohen naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Königlichen Universität zu Frankfurt a. M. Dresden: Druck von C. Heinrich, 1917.
Duodecimo. Original yellow wrappers printed in black. 1 plate. Diagrams and charts within the text. Three institutional ink stamps to the upper wrapper. Wrappers tanned with some short closed tears, splits and and chips at the ends of the spine and the corners of the upper wrapper. Contents tanned. A very good copy.
Knight, Margery & Mary W. Parke | Manx Algae
£25.00
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First edition, first impression of this guide by one of Britain’s leading phycologists.
Mary Winifred Parke (1908-1989) studied botany at Liverpool University, then joined the marine station on the Isle of Man where she studied algae under Margery Knight, who specialised in their cytology and life histories. “Together they published a handbook describing the algae of the area, Manx Algae, which appeared in 1931” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 978).
After receiving her doctorate Parke continued at the marine station. She made important discoveries about the microscopic organisms oysters that feed on, which led to a new culturing process for oyster farming. During the Second World War she and Knight designed new types of agar and alginate for bacteriological use. The development of powerful new microscopes after the war renewed her interest in marine flagellates, and together with the electron microscopy pioneer Irene Manton she published fourteen important papers. “They described unusual details of structure including extracellular scales and an organelle capable of attaching itself to solid substrates. They also described the role of other organelles that could form and package material for extracellular transport. They carefully described the importance of these organisms in rock-building as well as in the pelagic food chain” (ODNB).
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...An Algal Survey of the South End of the Isle of Man. With Two Maps and 19 Plates. L.M.B.C. Memoirs on Typical British Marine Plants & Animals, Edited by James Johnstone. Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1931. Octavo. Original white boards printed in black, red cloth backstrip. Folding chart, 2 maps, and 19 plates, errata slip at page 7. Binding rubbed and spotted with some wear at the ends of the spine. Very good condition.
Leakey, Mary | Olduvai Gorge. My Search for Early Man
£100.00
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First edition, first impression and a fine copy, uncommon in such nice condition.
Mary Leakey (1913-1996) was an accomplished archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who worked primarily on early humanoid fossils in Kenya and Tanzania with her husband and scientific partner Louis Leakey. “The site that will always be associated with Mary Leakey is Olduvai Gorge, a canyon in northern Tanzania containing rich collections of fossils and artefacts spanning about the last 2 million years. This became her second home, where she enjoyed fieldwork and research, accompanied by her pack of beloved dalmatian dogs, of which she was a well-known breeder. At Olduvai on 17 July 1959 she made one of the most famous fossil discoveries of all time, the skull of a 1.8 million-year-old early human relative whom Louis named Zinjanthropus (now Australopithecus or Paranthropus) boisei. Television coverage of the find made the Leakeys household names all over the world and brought them desperately needed funding from the National Geographic Society. Mary laboured under the hot sun, meticulously recording scatters of early stone tools and fossil bones, setting new standards for archaeological fieldwork, while Louis concentrated on fund-raising and lecturing. The technical details of her work are published in volumes 3 (1971) and 5 (1994) of the Olduvai Gorge series of Cambridge University Press and a popular account is given in Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979)” (ODNB).
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London: Collins, 1979.
Octavo. Original red boards, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. 6 double-sided plates from black and white photographs, line drawings throughout the text. A fine copy in the jacket.
Lebour, Marie V. | The Planktonic Diatoms of the Northern Seas
£250.00
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First edition, first impression. Presentation copy inscribed by the author to her sister on the front free endpaper, “To dear Yvonne, From M. V. L.” (see Lebour’s obituary in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, volume 52, p. 778).
Diatoms, a type of phytoplankton, are one of the earth’s keystone species. They are microscopic algae with silica shells that live in both freshwater and marine environments, and produce an amount of oxygen comparable to that of the all terrestrial rainforests combined. They are a primary food source for many other organisms, and accumulations of their shells in sediments record changes in the oceans and climate. Much was learned about phytoplankton during the early twentieth century, and marine biologist Marie Lebour (1876-1971) became one of the leading experts through her work at the Plymouth Marine Biological Laboratory. She “published two classical papers on this topic in 1917. Her subsequent work on taxonomy of plankton species resulted in her first book, Dinoflagellates of the Northern Seas, and in a subsequent volume in 1930 [the present work]. She identified no fewer than twenty-eight new species” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science). Lebour also studied molluscs and their parasites, euphausiid larvae, and the eggs and larvae of fish. She was also a talented draftsperson, and “her detailed and artistic sketches enhanced her publications” (Ogilvie).
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...With Four Plates. London: printed for the Ray Society, sold by Dulau & Co., Ltd., 1930.
Octavo. Original blue cloth elaborately blocked in blind, titles to spine and floral roundel to upper board gilt, yellow coated endpapers, top edge gilt. Ray Society half title with portrait vignette, 4 plates, engravings throughout the text. 16 page Ray Society membership and recent publications lists dated January 1930 at rear. Cloth just a little rubbed at the extremities, spine and edges of the boards tanned, free endpapers partially tanned. An excellent copy.
Logsdon, Mayme Irwin | Elementary Mathematical Analysis
£195.00
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A very attractive set of this uncommon mathematical textbook by the first woman to receive tenure in the University of Chicago mathematics department, Mayme Irwin Logsdon (1881-?).
“Mayme Logsdon returned to school after the death of her husband and earned all of her degrees from the University of Chicago. After teaching for four years at Hastings College, she returned to Chicago, where she advanced to associate professor. She remained at that rank for sixteen years without being promoted to professor. In 1946, she took a job as professor at the University of Miami and remained there until retirement [in 1961]. She was a dean of the College of Chicago from 1922 to 1925 and was an International education Board Fellow in Rome from 1924 to 1925. She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Mathematical Society, and the Mathematical Association. Her research interests were algebraic geometry and the problems of mathematics teaching.” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 800).
Logsdon wrote two textbooks for undergraduates, the present set and A Mathematician Explains (University of Chicago Press, 1936), and she served as the PhD adviser for four students at Chicago.
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...with Tables. Volume I [&] Volume II. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1932 & 1933.
2 volumes, octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spines gilt, borders to boards blocked in blind. Bookplate of John Hubley Schall, Jr. in volume I. Light rubbing to the extremities, a few small spots to the cloth of volume I. An excellent, fresh set.
Mann, Ida C. | The Development of the Human Eye
£650.00
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The rare first edition of this groundbreaking work on the embryology of the human eye. No copies are noted in auction records since 1980.
Dame Ida C. Mann (married name Gye, 1893-1983) entered the London School of Medicine for Women in 1914, and also undertook training at the Royal Free and St Mary's hospitals. During the period at St Mary's she assisted Professor J. E. S. Frazer in embryological research; her developmental studies were presented as a dissertation for the DSc (London, 1924), and formed the basis of her notable first textbook, The Development of the Human Eye (1928), still in print forty years later” (ODNB).
“After qualifying Mann decided to specialize in ophthalmology, and took her first post under Leslie Paton at St Mary's, becoming FRCS in 1924. She also held several teaching appointments while she progressed up the ladder towards consultant ophthalmologist status, reaching the highest point in 1927 with appointment as senior surgeon on the staff of Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, the first woman ever to do so. At the same time she established a Harley Street practice and consolidated herself as a leading clinical ophthalmologist in London, but still carried on her developmental studies and teaching (including the diploma course in Oxford). In this period up to the Second World War she learned and promoted the then new technique of slit-lamp microscopy of the eye, applying it both to patients and to animals in the London Zoo. She was also instrumental in bringing to London in 1938 Josef Dallos, the Hungarian pioneer of glass contact lenses, just ahead of the Nazi take-over of Hungary, and with him she established the first contact lens centre in the United Kingdom. With the outbreak of war it became necessary to evacuate Moorfields. At the instigation of Sir Hugh Cairns Mann moved to Oxford in 1941 to undertake the clinical training of medical students diverted from London, and there she was appointed to Margaret Ogilvy's readership in ophthalmology, as well as a personal chair, the first woman ever to hold the title of professor in the University of Oxford, and a professorial fellowship in St Hugh's College. Despite this time-consuming work she still travelled to London to perform surgery, carried out important research on the ocular effects of war gases, and kept up a staggering number of other activities, including the vigorous reorganization of Oxford Eye Hospital. In this period she was the first to use penicillin to treat ocular infection.” (ODNB).
Mann emigrated to Australia in 1949 and continued her medical and research career, travelling throughout Australasia and the Pacific to study eye diseases. “In recognition of Mann's many contributions to research, teaching, and clinical practice, she was appointed CBE (1950) and DBE (1980), as well as receiving honorary degrees, prizes, and medals from many countries (ODNB).
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...With a Foreword by Sir John Herbert Parsons. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1928.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt. 2 plates, numerous diagrams and illustrations from photos within the text. Spine rolled and a little faded, cloth rubbed at the extremities, upper corner bumped, lower hinge cracked, contents faintly toned. Very good condition.
Maryańska, Teresa & Halszka Osmólska | Aspects of Hadrosaurian Cranial Anatomy
£50.00
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A rare, inscribed offprint by Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). Inscribed by the author on the upper cover using an abbreviated form of her signature, “from HOsm...”. This article reports on the authors’ observations of hadrosaur cranial structures, based on fossils collected from the Upper Cretaceous Nemegt Formation by the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions as well as examination of the hadrosaurs in the collections of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Osmólska graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica.
Osmólska was a member of the important Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971 and resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. These excavations “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson). Osmólska was one of these specialists, and much of her work on the Mongolian fossils was carried out in partnership with another prominent palaeontologist, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019), the lead author of this piece.
Osmólska and Maryańska’s first major publication resulting from the Gobi expeditions was the discovery of Deinocheirus mirificus (’unusual horrible hand’), “a fossil collected during the 1965 field season at Altan Ula III in the Nemegt Basin. The find consisted of two nearly complete articulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. The forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. The claws on the three-fingered hand measured 323 mm in length (nearly 13 inches). A possible ornithomimosaur, the animal remains enigmatic decades later, pending further discoveries” (Dodson).
Over the course of her career, Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003” (Dodson). Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990.
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...[offprint from] Lethaia, Volume 12, pp. 265-273. Oslo: Lethaia, 1979.
10-page offprint, wire-stitched. Illustrations within the text. A little minor creasing. Excellent condition.
Maryańska, Teresa & Halszka Osmólska | Cranial Anatomy of Saurolophus Angustirostris with Comments on the Asian Hadrosauridae (Dinosauria)
£35.00
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An uncommon offprint announcing results from the important Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions.
These expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971, resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. They “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). The authors of this piece, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019) and Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), were two of these specialists, who worked as a team for many years and became leaders in their field.
Osmólska has been described as “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson). She graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica. Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003” (Dodson). Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990 and “unparalleled for its comprehensiveness at the time” (Borsuk-Białynicka & Jakubowski, “In Memoriam: Teresa Maryańska”, Acta Palaeontologica, volume 64, number 4, 2019).
Teresa Maryańska was associated with the Museum of the Earth at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, serving as vice-director between 1976 and 2006. “Her research was initially on invertebrate palaeontology. Her thesis concerned the Bryozoa, but she was always interested in vertebrates and looked for an opportunity to study them. Eventually, she was invited to participate in the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions to the Gobi desert, and became an active, highly appreciated participant of all four expeditions” (Borsuk-Białynicka). Maryańska’s first dinosaur research was on the ankylosaurs, and her magnum opus on their anatomy and taxonomy was published in 1977. She then worked on specimens of the pacycephalosaurs, protoceratopsians, and hadrosaurs, and oviraptors. She was also a co-author of several chapters of The Dinosauria.
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...Results of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions–Part IX [offprint from] Palaeontologia Polonica Number 42, pp. 5-24. Warsaw & Kraków: Zakład Paleobiologii, Polska Akademia Nauk, 1981.
11-page offprint, perfect bound. Original olive wrappers printed in black. 2 plates, illustrations within the text. Some minor creasing at the spine and light rubbing along the edges, small spot to the title page. Very good condition.
Maryańska, Teresa | O Gadach bez Sensacji
£250.00
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First edition, first impression. A rare copy of this charming, illustrated booklet on dinosaurs published by Warsaw’s Museum of the Earth. WorldCat only locates one copy, at the National Library of Poland. The detailed edition statement records that this book was submitted for typesetting in October 1969 and approved for printing in March 1970, with the order number dated 1969, for a total of 5,200 copies. Though the date 1979 appears above the statement, this is a typo, likely for 1970 (many thanks to Philip Penka of Bernett Penka Rare Books for the translation).
Author Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019)) was a leading dinosaur palaeontologist associated with the Museum of the Earth at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where she as vice-director between 1976 and 2006. “Her research was initially on invertebrate palaeontology. Her thesis concerned the Bryozoa, but she was always interested in vertebrates and looked for an opportunity to study them. Eventually, she was invited to participate in the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions to the Gobi desert, and became an active, highly appreciated participant of all four expeditions” (Borsuk-Białynicka & Jakubowski, “In Memoriam: Teresa Maryańska”, Acta Palaeontologica, volume 64, number 4, 2019).
Maryańska’s first dinosaur research was on the ankylosaurs, and her magnum opus on their anatomy and taxonomy was published in 1977. She then worked on specimens of the pacycephalosaurs, protoceratopsians, and hadrosaurs, and oviraptors, and many of her discoveries were made while working closely with her colleague and friend Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008). She was also a co-author of several chapters of The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990 and “unparalleled for its comprehensiveness at the time” (Borsuk-Białynicka). -
Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Geologiczne, Muzeum Ziemi pan Warszawa, 1970.
Duodecimo. Original yellow wrappers printed in black with a black and white photo of fossilised dinosaur skin to the upper wrapper. Folding map. Diagrams and illustrations from black and white photographs throughout the text. Contemporary price sticker to the rear cover. Wrappers a little tanned and rubbed, tail of spine bumped. A very good copy.
Metzger, Hélène | Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la Doctrine Chimique
£50.00
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Second edition, facsimile reissue of this influential work in the history of science, originally published in 1930.
Hélène Metzger (1889-1944) studied science against the wishes of her father, specialising in crystallography at the Sorbonne. Her first degree was awarded based on her study of lithium chlorate, and her doctoral thesis, submitted in 1918, was on the historical origins of crystallography. “From this beginning, Metzger began her focus on the history of chemistry, particularly French history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She moved away from the ‘great man’ idea of science and focused instead on the importance of lesser-known figures who often held ‘false’ theories... She continued to write the history of ideas as they existed within their particular timeframe” and “was active in history of science organizatios” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 889).
Metzger was an outsider for most of her life. “This status, doubtless related to her being a woman, especially one with a fairly low self-image, was made possible by Metzger’s economic independence. However, she found recognition and much comfort from a number of great scholars, notably André Lalande in Paris (who arranged a literary prize for her in 1924), and George Sarton at Harvard, the founder and editor of Isis, the major journal in the history of science, with whom she regularly exchanged letters... It is owing to her anti-positivistic historical method, which today is shared by most historians of science, that Metzger’s work is still appreciated and used today. (The late Thomas S. Kuhn’s favorable mention of Metzger in his celebrated The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962] played a determining role in this respect.)” (Freudenthal, Metzger’s entry in the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women).
During the Nazi occupation of France Metzger openly embraced her Jewish identity. “She remained in Paris until late 1941 and then moved to Lyon, where, again, she did not hesitate to register as a Jew. During the more than two years she remained there, she took part in an extraordinary enterprise: the “Bureau d'études juives” (Office for Jewish Studies), an informal group of persons—professors, teachers, lawyers, high state officials, publishers, etc.—who had been dismissed from their positions and who met weekly in order to study Judaism. Most of these people had had a very feeble relation to and knowledge of their Jewish roots, and they now gathered in order to learn something about the history of the tradition which was the cause of their misfortune. This was a heroic act of spiritual resistance: ‘in the troubled, dramatic and tragic period through which we live,’Metzger wrote to George Sarton in 1942, ‘[intellectual] effort is the only thing which can maintain us in a physical and moral stability’” (Freudenthal). Metzger was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in March, 1944.
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...Nouveau Tirage. Paris: Librairie Scientifique et Technique Albert Blanchard, 1974.
Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. Contents unopened. Slight creasing of the spine, a few small dark spots to the lower wrapper and a faint spot to the upper wrapper. An excellent copy.
Morgan, Ann Haven | Field Book of Animals in Winter
£150.00
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First edition, first printing and a lovely copy in the dust jacket. The Field Book of Animals in Winter is much less common than Morgan’s book on ponds and streams, and is rarely found in such nice condition.
As a child, Ann Haven Morgan (1882-1966) developed a love of nature by exploring the areas around her home in Connecticut. She earned her bachelor’s degree and doctorate at Cornell, the latter under James G. Needham at the Limnological Laboratory.
Returning to Cornell, “she advanced steadily up the academic ladder, becoming a full professor in 1918. During the summer she conducted research and taught courses on echinoderms at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole... Although limnology (the study of inland waters) was her special subject – on which she wrote a useful book, Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930) – Morgan was also interested in many other facets of zoology, particularly hibernating animals. Her Field Book of Animals in Winter (1939) reflected this interest. In 1949 the Encyclopaedia Britannica made it into an educational film” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science p. 913).
Among her other scientific interests were conservation and ecology and educational reform. Morgan was a member of numerous professional societies, including the American Entomological Society, American Society of Naturalists, American Society of Zoologists, and the New York Herpetological Society. She was prominent enough to be one of only three women included in the 1933 edition of American Men of Science. -
...With 283 Illustrations, Including 4 Full-Colour Plates. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, all edges dyed red. With the dust jacket. Photographic frontispiece and 14 plates of which 11 are double-sided, including 2 double-sided colour illustrations. Numerous illustrations within the text. Yellow pencil sometimes used to highlight passages, primarily in the early chapters. A few tiny bumps at the edges of the cloth. An excellent, fresh copy in a very attractive example of the dust jacket that is lightly rubbed with some small nicks and chips, a little creasing at the edges, and mild toning of the spine panel.
Muir-Wood, Helen | On the Morphology and Classification of the Brachiopod Suborder Chonetoidea
£75.00
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First edition of this culminating work by one of the world’s leading experts on prehistoric brachiopods, a large phylum of marine bivalves valuable for their role in understanding and dating geological strata.
“Brachiopods are characteristic of shallow marine environments, and in some Palaeozoic rocks they are the main rock-forming component. Brachiopods are also particularly suitable for palaeoecological analyses. Influenced by such factors as water depth, salinity, oxygen levels and static lifestyle, the distribution patterns of fossil brachiopods provide a useful tool in deducing the position of ancient shorelines and the past distribution of land and sea. Through the rapid evolution of some brachiopod lineages, they can be useful for understanding the relative ages of rock successions, and for correlation” (”Brachiopods: BSG Fossils and Geological Time”, the British Geological Survey website).
Helen Muir-Wood (1896-1968) “spent her career at the British Museum of Natural History and became an authority on the fossil brachiopods of the British Isles, India, Malaysia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordon, and Somalia... She pioneered the classification of Mesozoic forms on their internal structure and wrote a history of the study of these fossils. However, even though she was the recognized expert on the phylum Brachiopoda, she never attempted a synthetic work that would trace its evolution from the simplest shell-bearing phase to its state of near extinction today. She was an extremely careful scholar who refused to generalize when she was not sure that the evidence was totally certain–both a strength and a weakness. Muir-Wood was awarded the Lyell Fund by the Geological Society of London in 1930 and Lyell Medal in 1958 for her contributions to the study of Brachiopoda. When she retired from the Museum of Natural History, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her services to that great institution” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 923).
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...With Sixteen Plates and Twenty Four Figures in the Text. London: printed by order of the Trustees of the British Museum, May, 1962.
Large octavo. Original grey cloth, titles to spine gilt, borders of boards blocked in blind. 16 plates from photographs, diagrams within the text. Faint ring mark to the upper board, a couple of small spots to the lower board. An excellent fresh copy.
Neurath, Marie | Inside the Atom
Sold Out
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RESERVED First edition, first impression of this important work of science illustration by data-visualisation pioneer Marie Neurath (1898-1986).
Neurath, together with her husband Otto and their colleague Gerd Arntz, was one of the founders of Isotype, a simplified visual method of displaying complex information to the public. First developed in the 1920s, and originally known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, the goal of Isotype was ”to cross national and social divides in a time before widespread global communication. To do that, Isotype went back to basics and stripped away all things unnecessary, illogical, or alienating—and in doing so, helped to establish some of the core principles of graphic design. Today, Isotype’s legacy can be seen everywhere from newspapers and textbooks to signage, transit maps, interfaces, and emojis” (Inglis, “Meet Marie Neurath,” AIGA Eye on Design, September 17, 2019).
Marie Neurath “was a remarkable practitioner” who “researched, calculated, and co-designed nearly every Isotype ever created, from the early days in Vienna in 1925 all the way to when she retired in 1971” (Forrest, “The Missing Legacy of Marie Neurath,” Medium, January 20, 2020). She described her role as that of the “Transformer” of data, writing that “From the data given in words and figures, a way has to be found to extract the essential facts and put them into picture form. It is the responsibility of the transformer to understand the data, to get all necessary information from the expert, to decide what is worth transmitting to the public, how to make it understandable, how to link it with general knowledge or with information already given in other charts. In this sense, the transformer is the trustee of the public” (Neurath, The Transformer, 2009).
Marie continued the work after Otto’s death in 1945, becoming best known for the series of children’s books she published over the next twenty years. “In children’s educational books Marie found an ideal place to put Isotype’s methods into practice. Young readers were more engaged by pictures than words, and this focus on the visual meant these books were easily translated and published abroad, fulfilling Isotype’s original aims of being truly international” (Inglis).
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London: Max Parrish, Isotype. Printed by Graphic Reproductions Ltd., 1956.
Quarto. Original red cloth-patterned boards, titles to spine and upper board, and crystal design to upper board gilt. 3-colour offset lithography. Corners bumped, spine rolled, boards darkened corresponding to jacket chips, contents toned with occasional small spots, spotting to edges of text block. A good copy in the dulled and marked jacket with chips from the corners and ends of the spine, and a closed tear running halfway up the spine panel.
Nicholls, Elizabeth L. | "The Oldest Known North American Occurence of the Plesiosauria
£45.00
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The rare offprint of the first published paper by palaeontologist Elizaabeth L. Nicholls (1946-2004).
Plesiosaurs were long-necked, marine reptiles that evolved during the Triassic period. They survived the mass extinction that led to the Jurassic, and flourished alongside the dinosaurs during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The partially articulated plesiosaur skeleton described in this paper was discovered in 1970, in the foothills of southwestern Alberta. Collected by a team from the University of Calgary in 1974, it was notable for being the earliest specimen yet recorded in North America, where plesiosaur fossils are more commonly found in later sediments of the Cretaceous. This paper describes the preparation of the fossil up to October, 1975, describing the specimen as appearing to be complete except for the skull, though further work was needed to confirm this.
This paper was published while its author, Elizabeth Nicholls, was a graduate student in palaeontology at the University of Calgary, where she would complete her PhD in 1989. Nicholls became an expert on marine reptiles, working at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta and co-editing the book Ancient Marine Reptiles, published in 1997. She is best known for excavating, from a remote region of Canada, the largest marine reptile ever discovered, a 220-million-year-old ichthyosaur which she named Shonisaurus sikanniensis. Nichollas received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for the excavation in 2000, and in 2017 the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre established the Dr. Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Nicholls Award for Excellence in Palaeontology. She was also honoured by having a genus of extinct sea turtle, Nichollsemy, and a mosasaur, Latoplatecarpus nichollsae, named after her.
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...(Reptilia: Sauropterygia) from the Liassic (Lower Jurassic) Fernie Group, Alberta, Canada." [Offprint from] Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Volume 13, Number 1, pages 185-188. [Ottawa]: National Research Council, Canada, 1976.
4-page offprint. Wire-stitched, original blue wrappers printed in black. Illustrations from black and white photographs within the text. Shelf numbers in black ink to the upper wrapper. Corner of the upper wrapper creased, mild horizontal crease affecting wrappers and contents. Very good condition.
Norman, David & Angela Milner | Eyewitness Books: Dinosaur
£150.00
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First edition, first impression of Dinosaur, one of the earliest titles in the best-selling Eyewitness Books series, together with the first printing of the American edition, published in the same year. Copies of the first printings of the 1980s Eyewitness books are scarce, particularly in such beautiful condition.
The publisher Dorling Kindersley was founded in London 1974, and in the 1980s began taking advantage of new design technologies to radically revise the traditional page layouts of children’s books. As they described to Children’s Software Review in 1997, the goal was to “slow down the pictures and speed up the text”, allowing children to “experience information from their own particular point of view” (cited by Stringham, “The Efficacy of Small Multiples in the Visual Language of Instructional Designs”, Brigham Young University thesis, 2012). "What DK did—with almost revolutionary panache—was essentially to reinvent nonfiction books by breaking up the solid pages of gray type that had previously been their hallmark, reducing the text to bite-size, nonlinear nuggets that were then surrounded by pictures that did more than adorn—they also conveyed information. Usually full color, they were so crisply reproduced they seemed to leap off the page” (Cart, “Eyewitness Books: Putting the Graphic in Lexographic”, Booklist, October 15, 2002). There are now more than 100 Eyewitness Books, and more than 50 million copies have been sold in thirty-six languages.
The first Eyewitness Books were published in 1988, and Dinosaur appeared the following year, one of the first sixteen in the series and still in print today. Its authors are both prominent palaeontologists. Angela Milner, of the Natural History Museum in London, has done important work on archaeopteryx, providing evidence in the debate over whether it was a bird or dinosaur. David Norman is curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Museum. In 2017 he and two other paleontologists made the case for a complete revaluation of early dinosaur evolution and taxonomy, arguing that the two main dinosaur clades were more closely related than previously understood.
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London & New York: Dorling Kinderseley, Ltd. & Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1989.
2 volumes, tall quarto. Original glossy white boards illustrated with photos, dinosaur-patterned endpapers. Colour illustrations throughout. The London printing has faint toning of the front free endpaper, the New York printing is lightly rubbed at the tips. An excellent, fresh set.
Osmólska, Halszka | Nasal Salt Gland in Dinosaurs
£50.00
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A rare, inscribed offprint by Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). Possibly inscribed by the author on the upper cover, “with compliments of H. Osmólska". This paper discusses the purpose of nasal glands in dinosaurs, and whether they were used to excrete salt, as in some bird species.
Osmólska graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica.
Osmólska was a member of the important Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971 and resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. These excavations “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson). Osmólska was one of these specialists, and much of her work on the Mongolian fossils was carried out in partnership with another prominent palaeontologist, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019).
Osmólska and Maryańska’s first major publication resulting from the Gobi expeditions was the discovery of Deinocheirus mirificus (’unusual horrible hand’), “a fossil collected during the 1965 field season at Altan Ula III in the Nemegt Basin. The find consisted of two nearly complete articulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. The forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. The claws on the three-fingered hand measured 323 mm in length (nearly 13 inches). A possible ornithomimosaur, the animal remains enigmatic decades later, pending further discoveries” (Dodson).
Over the course of her career, Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003”. Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990.
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...(Nosowe Gruczoły solne u Dinozaurów). [Offprint from] Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Volume 24, Number 2, pages 205-215. Warsaw: Zakład Paleobiologii, Polska Akademia Nauk, 1979.
11-page offprint. Original white wrappers printed in black. Skull diagrams within the text. A couple of minor creases and scratches, primarily to the lower wrapper. Excellent condition.
Patterson, Flora W. & Vera K. Charles | Mushrooms and Other Common Fungi
£35.00
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First edition of this well-illustrated guide to mushroom identification for the amateur collector.
The first female mycologist to work at the United States Department of Agriculture, Flora Patterson (1847-1928) exhibited “the tenacity, audacity, and perspicacity of a true scientific visionary” (Reynolds, “Flora Patterson”, Women in Microbiology, p. 219). She initially studied fungi as a childhood hobby, then attended several universities as a non-traditional student, taking a plant pathology course at Iowa State and completing her education at Radcliffe College, from where she was able to work in the Harvard Grey Herbarium.
At the USDA Patterson “published on edible and poisonous mushrooms and on fungus diseases of economic importance, working and publishing with the mycologist Vera Charles” (Ogilvie, p. 990). Patterson directed the US National Fungus Collections for nearly thirty years, growing it from 19,000 to 115,000 specimens. She was in charge of identifying fungal diseases of agricultural importance, and made numerous important contributions in this area, including the identification of chestnut blight and pineapple rot. Her involvement in Japan’s gift of cherry trees to the US led to the passage of the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912.
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Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office for the United States Department of Agriculture, 1915.
Octavo. Original cream wrappers printed in black. 38 plates from photographs. Wrappers faintly toned, mild dampstain affecting the lower corner of the wrappers and text, with some abraded areas where the corners of the leaves have stuck together, not generally affecting text. Very good condition.
Payne, Nellie M. | “Freezing and Survival of Insects at Low Temperature"
£100.00
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The uncommon offprint of the doctoral thesis of entomologist and agricultural chemist Dr. Nellie Maria de Cottrell Payne (1900 - 1990). WorldCat locates only nine copies, mainly in central European institutions, as well as the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and McGill.
Payne was born in Colorado and obtained her graduate degrees at Kansas State Agricultural College and the University of Minnesota. Her research encompassed “insect and invertebrate cold hardiness, pigments of hydroids, and the physiology and mathematics of population growth... Following the completion of her doctorate, she was appointed as a National Research Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania until 1927, spending a brief time afterwards at the University of Vienna and University Berlin as a research investigator. She then returned to the University of Minnesota as a lecturer in entomology from 1933 to 1937. Payne also spent numerous summers in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, publishing primarily on the hibernation and low temperature effects of insects and the physiological effects of parasitoids on their hosts. Of her 36 publications, all as sole author, 33 were a result of her research prior to entering industry. In 1937, she began her career in industry as a research entomologist and zoologist with American Cyanamid. In 1957, she accepted a position as a literature chemist for Velsicol Chemical in Chicago, with whom she remained until 1971... In addition to her active membership in ESA, Payne was also a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Zoologists, and the New York Academy of Science. She served as editor and member staff of Biological Abstracts from 1927–1933, and was elected as member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1921” (Entomological Society of America biography).
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...A thesis submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the university of Minnesota in partial fulfillment for the degree of doctor of philosophy.” Reprinted from the Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 1, No. 2, April, 1926, pp. 270-282. Baltimore: Quarterly Review of Biology, 1926.
14 page offprint. Original cream wrappers, titles printed to upper wrapper, stapled. Tiny pencil notation to upper wrapper. Wrappers partially toned and a little rubbed and creased, mild creasing of the top corners of the leaves. An excellent copy.
Peck, Leilani, Leonora Moragne, et al | Focus on Food
£50.00
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First edition. One of the authors of this home economics textbook was the prominent Black nutrition scientist Lenora Moragne (1931-2020) who worked as a hospital dietician before earning her doctorate at Cornell.
“With an illustrious career that spanned 60 years, Moragne held positions in hospitals, industry, nutrition publishing, academia and government. Her positions within the federal government include head of nutrition education and training for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service; nutrition coordinator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and a professional staff member for Sen. Bob Dole (Kan.), specializing in nutrition. She was the first professional female (of any race or ethnic group) to be employed by the Senate Agriculture Committee. From 1970 until she was recruited by Dole, Moragne taught at Hunter College and was the college’s first African American professor. During her years in Washington, D.C., she wrote nutrition legislation, improved school lunch programs and developed a pamphlet titled ‘Nutrition and Your Health…Dietary Guidelines for Americans 1990.’ Moragne often traveled throughout the U.S. to promote nutrition and dietetics and delivered lectures to nutrition professionals” (”Remembering Leonora Morage”, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation website, February 5th 2021).
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New York: Webster Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974.
Quarto. Original orange laminate boards printed in green and purple. Colour illustrations throughout. Binding a little rubbed and bumped, mild waviness to text block. A very good copy.
Peckham, George W. & Elizabeth G. On the Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps
£150.00
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First edition, first printing of both titles, the “Additional Observations” being a presentation copy inscribed, “Mr, Claus H. Shirum [?], compliments of the authors”.
Authors Elizabeth and George Peckham were entomologists and archnologists who together pioneered the study of jumping spiders; were early proponents of including behaviour in taxonomical analysis; and performed some of the first studies on sexual selection. Elizabeth was the first female science graduate of Vasser, one of Milwaukee’s first librarians, and a suffragist. George obtained a medical degree but chose to teach high school, and in 1880 the Peckhams introduced the first biological laboratory course in an American High school, also incorporating Darwinian concepts in their pedagogy.
Together the Peckhams described 63 genera and 366 species, and one genus, at least twenty species, and a scientific society are named in their honour. Following George’s death in 1914, Elizabeth continued their scientific work and was awarded a PhD by Cornell in 1914. On the Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps is now considered a scientific classic, for both its style and scholarship. -
[Bound together with] “Additional Observations on the Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps” [in] Bulletin of the Wisconsin Natural History Society, vol. 1, no. 2, April 1900. Madison, WI: the state of Wisconsin, 1898.
Octavo. Contemporary library style binding of black half skiver, black cloth sides, spine gilt in compartments. 14 plates of which 2 are chromolithographs and the 12 are lithographs. Binding rubbed with wear at the corners, spine ends, and hinges, contents toned. A very good copy.
Piccard, Sophie | Sur les Ensembles de Distances
£150.00
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First edition of this significant work on set theory, text unopened and in the original wrappers.
Author Sophie Piccard (1904-1990) showed great mathematical ability from an early age. She was born and completed her first undergraduate education in Russia, but fled to Switzerland with her parents in 1925. Piccard then completed a second mathematics degree, and obtained her doctoral dissertation on probability at the University of Lausanne. Following her father’s death, she worked as an actuary and then an administrative secretary, but continued doing research, and in 1936 became assistant in geometry to at professor at the University of Neuchâtel. She succeeded to his position in 1938, and from 1943 held the chair of higher geometry and probability theory, becoming the first female full professor in Switzerland. “Her research interests were set theory and group theory. She published papers in other areas as well: function theory, the theory of relations, probability theory, and actuarial science” (Ogilvie, p. 1020).
“In 1939 Piccard published her book 'Sur les ensembles de distances des ensembles de points d'un espace Euclidean.' If A and B are point sets of a Euclidean space, the distance set of the pair (A,B), denoted by D(A,B), is the set of all numbers d such that there is a pair of points, one in A and the other in B, whose distance is d. Piccard's book made a detailed study of various questions concerning D(A,B). The review of the book in Mathematical Reviews said that 'a few results in the field under investigation are due to Steinhaus, Sierpinski and Ruziewicz, but after chapter I, the results are almost entirely new'" (Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College website).
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...Des Ensembles de Points d'un Espace Euclidien. Neuchâtel: Secrétariat de l’Université, 1939.
Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. Text block unopened. Wrappers tanned along the edges and spine, a little creasing at the edges, small chip at the top of the upper wrapper, contents faintly toned in the margins. An excellent copy.
Pickford, Grace E. | Studies on the Digestive Enzymes of Spiders
£50.00
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An uncommon offprint by noted endocrinologist Grace E. Pickford (1902-1986). An attractive and fresh copy, the contents unopened.
Pickford was educated at Cambridge and Yale, and taught at Albertus Magnus College, Yale, and Hiram College. Taking advantage of the Yale Peabody Museum’s extensive natural history collections, she became an authority on cephalopod systematics and in 1951 joined the Galathea deep-sea expedition to study rare octopods in the Indo-Malayan region. During the 1940s she began researching the killifish, and it became the organism “on which she established her outstanding work on fish endocrinology. She became interested in the growth rings on fish scales, and the examined effects of the newly developed growth hormone upon the endocrine system of the fish. In the process, she developed a number of techniques adapted from paediatric research and her earlier work on invertebrates. Pickford published a seminal monograph, The Physiology of the Pituitary Gland of Fishes (1957), which soon became the bible for scientists working on the endocrinology of lower vertebrates” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1021).
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...[published in] Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Volume 35, December 1942, Pages 33-72. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Yale University Press, 1942.
Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. Contents unopened. Two mild, vertical creases to the upper wrapper, just a little faint toning along the edges of the wrappers. Excellent condition.
Pitt-Rivers, Rosalind & Jamshed R. Tata. | The Thyroid Hormones
£150.00
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First edition, first printing of this key work by one of Britain’s leading biochemists. A beautiful copy in the jacket.
Rosalind Pitt-Rivers earned her PhD in biochemistry in 1939 under the supervision of Sir Charles Harington, whose lab at the National Institute for Medical research she then joined. The Second World War interrupted her career, but in 1950 she returned to Harington’s lab. “This move turned out to be a propitious event in her scientific career. Inspired by Harington's major interest in elucidating the structure of thyroid hormones, she became deeply involved with biochemical research on how what was then thought to be the only thyroid hormone, L-thyroxine (T4), was synthesized in the thyroid gland. In 1951 a young Canadian endocrinologist, Jack Gross, joined Pitt-Rivers as a postdoctoral fellow to discover more about an unidentified iodine-containing compound that he had earlier observed in human and rodent blood. Taking advice from experts in analytical biochemistry at that time working at the NIMR (in particular, A. J. P. Martin, A. T. James, and H. Gordon), Pitt-Rivers and Gross very rapidly identified this unknown compound to be 3,3ʹ,5-triiodothyronine (T3), a report of which was published in The Lancet in 1952. At about the same time a group in Paris at the Collège de France (S. Lissitzky, R. Michel, and J. Roche) identified T3 in the thyroid gland and showed that it was made there as a component of thyroglobulin and secreted into the bloodstream. The following year Gross and Pitt-Rivers were able to demonstrate that a large part of T3 in the blood was derived from T4, and that it was considerably more potent than its precursor, thus establishing T3 to be the principal thyroid hormone. The discovery of triiodothyronine quickly brought Pitt-Rivers international recognition, including her election as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1954” (ODNB).
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...With a Chapter on Diseases of the Thyroid. New York: Pergamon Press, 1959.
Octavo. Original burgundy cloth, titles to spine and upper board gilt. With the dust jacket. 3 plates, of which 1 is double-sided. Faint partial toning of the endpapers. An excellent, fresh copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the extremities with light toning of the spine panel.
Robertson-Miller, Ellen. Butterfly and Moth Book
Sold Out
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First edition, first printing. A beautiful copy of this uncommon and attractively designed work on butterflies and moths with numerous illustrations by the author.
Ellen Bell Robertson-Miller (1859-1937) was a noted painter, naturalist, and columnist who studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students’ League of New York. In addition to entomology, Robertston-Miller was interested in marine life and ornithology, and often held speaking engagements and published articles on natural subjects. She was co-author of Wild Flowers of the North-Eastern States (1895) with Margaret Christine Whiting.
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...Personal Studies and Observations of the More Familiar Species. With Illustrations from Drawings by the Author and Photographs by J. Lyonel King, G. A. Bash, Dr. F. D. Snyder and Others. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912.
Octavo. Original grey cloth elaborately blocked with an Art Nouveau design of a yellow swallowtail butterfly to the upper board and spine, buff endpapers. Photographic frontispiece with tissue guard, illustrations throughout the text from both photographs and drawings. Bookplate of John M. Witheridge. Fine condition.
Rothschild, Miriam & Theresa Clay | Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos
£60.00
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First edition, first impression of this classic by a leading British parasitologist.
Miriam Rothschild (1908-2005) was a member of the prominent banking family and was introduced to zoology by her father, an amateur naturalist, and her physician uncle. Though Rothschild had only a limited formal education, she was intellectually self-directed and was recommended for study at the Naples Biological Station, where she “developed a strong interest in parasitology, noting that the molluscs with which she was working were infected with flatworms” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1128). She then went to the Biological Station at Plymouth where she continued researching parasites and their hosts until her laboratory was bombed during the Second World War.
During the war Rothschild opened her childhood home to refugees and worked with Alan Turing on the Enigma project. “In addition to her active war work, she continued with her natural history investigations, cataloguing her father’s collections and studying human and animal parasites, especially fleas. She studied flea reproduction, their host preferences, and the mechanics of flea leaping. In collaboration with Nobel laureate Tadeus reichstein, she demonstrated the manner in which the monarch caterpillar’s diet of milkweed plants protects it from birds and other predators” (Ogilvie). Rothschild published more than three hundred scientific articles in addition to several successful popular works, and 2,000 of her microscope slides are now part of the Natural History Museum collections.
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...A Study of Bird Parasites. With 90 Black and White Photographs, 4 Maps & 22 Drawings. London: Collins, 1952.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. 20 plates, illustrations within the text. Cloth very slightly faded along the edges of the boards, gilt spine titles dulled, light partial toning of the free endpapers. A very good copy in the rubbed and dulled jacket with two closed tears and associated creasing at the top of the upper panel, as well as a few other small nicks and a crease along the fold of the upper flap.
Sabin, Florence R. | A Model of the Medulla Oblongata, Pons, and Midbrain of a New-Born Babe
£650.00
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The uncommon offprint of physician and anatomist Florence Sabin’s first major work, undertaken when she was an undergraduate and published the following year as the classic textbook An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. WorldCat locates only four copies of this offprint, at King’s College London, Brown University, Washington University St Louis, and the University of Sydney.
Sabin was born in 1871, and attended Smith College, where she decided to become a doctor. “The newly opened Johns Hopkins Medical School was the obvious choice for an aspiring woman physician, for it had been financed by a group of Baltimore women who had attached to their gift the stipulation that women be admitted on the same terms as men” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1140). Sabin began her medical training in 1896, quickly becoming a favourite of anatomist Franklin Mall, who “encouraged her to go into research. As an undergraduate she constructed a three-dimensional model of the medulla, pons and midbrain, and in connection with this project wrote a laboratory manual, An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. This manual was published in 1901 and became a popular textbook” (Ogilvie).
Sabin received her medical degree in 1900 and began an internship in internal medicine, and was then awarded a fellowship in anatomy. “She became the university’s first woman faculty member in 1902 and progressed through the ranks, receiving an appointment as professor of histology in 1917 — the first full professorship awarded to a woman at Hopkins” (Ogilvie). Over the course of her career Sabin studied a wide range of subjects, including cell morphology, the physiology of connective tissues and blood cells, immunology, and particularly the body’s reaction to tuberculosis. “Her research on the lymphatics was original, though controversial at the time. Her idea that the lymphatics represented a one-way system closed at the collecting ends, where the fluids entered by seepage arising from pre-existing veins instead of independently was later proved correct” (Ogilvie). After retiring from Johns Hopkins and moving to Denver Colorado, she had a second career as a public health advocate who achieved the passage of a number of public health reform bills.
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[Reprinted from Volume IX of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Reports, Contributions to the Science of Medicine: Dedicated by His Pupils to William Henry Welch on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Doctorate, pp. 925-1023. Together with Clark, “the Blood Vessels of the Human Ovary” and Young, “The Gonococcus”. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1900].
Tall quarto. Original buff wrappers. 6 doubled-sided greyscale plates and 3 single-sided chromolithographic plates at rear accompanying the Sabin paper. 5 plates, of which 2 are folding, accompanying the Clark paper. The title page and early portion of the Clark paper seem to be lacking, perhaps due to a production error. Wrappers just a little rubbed with some short splits and creasing at the edges. The extreme edges of the contents, particularly at the front, are a little toned and creased with some nicks and short splits. Excellent, fresh condition.