1862. 8vo, pp. xvi, 592; with engraved frontispiece portrait; very small marginal tears at head of pp. 485-7, minor dampstain at head of portrait and around margins, with some light foxing and browning throughout; with presentation inscription on front free endpaper ‘John H. Seale with the best wishes of Arthur F. Walter, on his leaving Eton Election(?) 1863’; attractive full tan calf, spine in compartments with raised bands, elaborately tooled in gilt with green morocco label, all edges marbled, some minor scuffing to upper cover, but otherwise a fine copy. A most attractively bound later revised edition of Mary Somerville’s (1780-1872) noted third work, first published in 1848 and now considered to be the first textbook on the subject in English. It was to be her most popular work, with six editions published during her lifetime, and for which was was was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1869.
‘Physical geography is a description of the earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings, and the causes of that distribution’ (p. 1). ‘Relying on the new geology of Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison, Somerville described the ‘successive convulsions which have ultimately led to its present geographical arrangement, and to the actual distribution of land and water’. But the text was very nearly destroyed. Physical Geography was almost ready to go to press when the first volume of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos appeared. Although Mary’s was still the first work of its kind in English, she decided to burn her manuscript. Her husband and Sir John Herschel, to whom the work was dedicated, convinced her to finish it. It went on to go through seven editions’ (Alic, p. 188).
‘Her remarkable life spanned almost a century, from 1780 to 1872. It was an exciting century for physical science, for great strides were made in astronomy, in geology, in meteorology, and in geography. Many of the great pioneers in these fields - John Hershel, Charles Lyell, Roderick Murchison, and Alexander von Humboldt - were her friends, and they accepted her as a fellow scientist and acknowledged her contributions to science. Yet is was also an age when women were not given a formal education. Mrs Somerville was completely self-taught, which makes her four books in various fields of science all the more remarkable. Her books were not mere compilations of facts but attempts to explain the interrelationships between the sciences. She explained her aim in her scientific writings by quoting Francis Bacon on the title page of “Physical Geography” [first edition]: No natural phenomenon can be adequately studied by itself alone but to be understood, it must be considered as it stands connected with all nature’. (Sanderson, ‘Mary Somerville: her Work in Physical Geography’, in Geographical Review, Vol. 64, No. 3, 1974, pp. 410).
Provenance: presented to Sir John Henry Seale (1843-1914), Third Baronet Seale of Mount Boon, Dartmouth, Devon, and who later became a barrister, and Justice of the Peace for Devon and Monmouth.