[2], viii, 328 pp. Several woodcut decorations in text. (12mo) period paste paper boards, leather spine label. First French Edition.
Blumenbach’s textbook of physiology, first published in Latin in Göttingen in 1787, which was a highly influential exposition from the point of view of multiple vital principles. “Blumenbach gave the body a threefold constitution. He saw it as comprising materials (represented by fluids), structure (represented by solids), and vital powers (permitting motor interactions between fluids and solids); these three seemed to him to be ontologically separate but causally interdependent. The fluids he grouped further as (a) chyle, (b) blood, and (c) secretions and excretions. The solids he thought of as often fibrous; otherwise parenchymatous...Three orders of vital powers, he said, are responsible respectively for (1) organic formation and increase, (2) motion, and (3) sensation. The first two sorts of powers, formative and motive, are common to plants and animals; the sensitive, exclusive with animals including men.”--Hall, History of General Physiology, II (1969), pp. 99-105. “His classification of the sub-divisions of the human race, which forms the latter part of this work, was the first to utilize facial configuration as well as skin color, and his system has survived to the present with but little modification.”--See Heirs of Hippocrates 1113, citing the first edition. Blake, p. 51. Wellcome, II, p. 183.