(Catania)

View taken form the rare Historia, et meteorologia incendii Aetnaei anni 1669. Ioan. Alphonsi Borelli in Academia Pisana matheseos professoris accessit. Responsio ad censuras reu. p. Honorati Fabri contra librum auctoris De Vi percussionis Regio Iulio, in Officina Dominici Ferri, 1670.

The rare first edition of the most significant 17th-century study of volcanology, with a fine plate depicting the great 1669 eruption. The work was written by Borelli during his stay in Messina, in behalf of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento and of the secretary of the London Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg. The treatise offers not only a narrative description of the Etna eruption, but also systematic observations on the morphology of volcanoes, the nature and the causes of volcanic eruptivity, the generation and the structure of lava, disagreeding with the theories developed by Athanasius Kircher in the Mundus Subterraneus, and benefiting from the publication in 1669 of Steno's De solido intro solidum (see item E). “Borelli presented his own highly sophisticated understanding of a volcanic eruption as a geographical phenomenon which could be studied physically, chemically, and mathematically. His account of Etna's most recent eruption explicitly critiqued a central argumeny put forth by the Jesuit Kircher in the Subterranean World. Using evidence from Etna's lava flow and chancing morphology, Borelli negated the idea of eternal mountains and perpetual subterranean fires poetically evoked by Kircher” (P. Findlen, Agostino Scilla, p. 147).

Copperplate, very good condition. Rare.