1750. Small 8vo, pp. [xvi], 72; each page within typographic border, and with numerous woodcut head- and tail pieces; with running headling ‘Lucine affranchie des loix du concours’; small stain affecting fore-edge of pp. 3-16 (possibly candle-wax) and ink stain to final verso, with some very minor and occasional soiling and staining, otherwise clean and crisp; an attractive copy in contemporary half-calf over block printed decorative boards, with red sprinkled edges, spine in compartments with raised bands, ruled in blind, with small paper label at head of spine numbered in manuscript, head of spine chipped with loss, covers a little soiled, extremities and corners lightly bumped. An charming copy of this translation, with substantial additions, by Etienne Sainte-Colombe, of Hill’s famous scientific spoof Lucina sine concubitu. A letter... to the Royal Society London 1750, 4th edition of the same year. The additions are not found in the earlier translation attributed to J. P. Moët of which several editions were printed in 1750.
Written at the peak of philosophical discussions on generation and the preformation of eggs and spermatozoa, this amusing satire, “mockingly” addressed to the Royal Society is based on an idea first posed by William Wollaston in his ‘Religion of Nature Delineated’, “that human seed, or spermatozoa, floated everywhere in the air... [Hill] affected to have invented a machine for trapping the seminal animacules borne on the West wind. ‘Accordingly after much Exercise of my Invention, I contrived a wonderful cylindrical, caloptrical, rotundo-concavo-convex Machine... which, being hermetically sealed at one End, and electrified according to the nicest Laws of Electricity, I erected a convenient Attitude to the West, as a kind of Trap to intercept the floating Animaculae in that prolific quarter of the Heavens. The Event answered my Expectation; and when I had caught a sufficient number of these small original unexpanded Minims of Existence, I spread them out carefully like Silk-worm’s Eggs upon White-paper, and then applying my best Microscope, plainly discerned them to be little Men and Women, exact in all their Lineaments and Limbs, and ready to offer themselves little Candidates for Life, whenever they should happen to be imbibed with Air or Nutriment, and conveyed down into the Vessels of Generation’” (Needham, History of Embryology, pp. 186-87). Having trapped these airborne ‘minims of existence’ Hill offered to administer them ‘as a dose of physick’. His discovery he believes, that the world had been in error in the matter of conception for six thousand years, should be seen as being of more benefit than the discoveries of Newton. It could restore the honour of many women who throughout history had been unable to explain their pregnancy, remove guilt over fornication, the eradication of venereal disease, and even the need for marriage, a tie ‘inconsistent with all the Articles of modern pleasure’,.
Composer, actor, author and botanist, Hill (1714-1775), wrote the work as a hoax on the Royal Society, apparently in revenge for his rejection as a candidate for membership, in recognition he hoped, for his botanical research. His susbsequent monumental 26 volume illustrated ‘The Vegetable System’ was one of the first to adopt the nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus, and indeed he was later created a knight of the Order of Vasa in 1774 by Gustav III of Sweden, after which he adopted the title of ‘Sir John Hill’. The work was quickly taken up as a piece of popular sexology, with a least four more English printings in 1750, and was immediately translated into other languages. ‘This French translation has a new commentary on the text and new material, such as the account of a widow made pregnant by a married woman; experiments on the semen of various animals; a dissertation on human semen and the prodigious numbers of tiny animals it contains; and the disputes and havoc that this wicked little book has begun to create among husbands and wives’ (Gaskell Catalogue 29, item 51).