Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy

London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green and John Taylor, 1831. First edition (later printing--1st 1830).

1831 EARLY PRINTING OF HERSCHEL'S LANDMARK GUIDE TO SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION THAT STRONGLY INFLUENCED DARWIN IN CRAFTING THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

11x18 cm red cloth boards, paper spine label, armorial bookplate of Jas. R. Holcome, Jes. Coll. Oxford, laid-in list of Dr. Lardner's Cabinet Library , Vol 1, and Advertisement future volumes; 12 pp publisher's advertisements, vii, 372 pp, [1], 12 pp publisher's advertisements dated January 1831. Cover edges faded, edges worn, corners bumped, spine faded. unopened, text clean and unmarked, very good minus.

SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL (1792 - 1871) was an English polymath, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer, and botanist. His Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy as part of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet cyclopedia set out methods of scientific investigation with an orderly relationship between observation and theorizing. It became an authoritative statement of the methods of scientific investigation, anticipating John Stuart Mill in the formulation of the famous four methods of scientific investigation. He described nature as being governed by laws which were difficult to discern or to state mathematically, and the highest aim of natural philosophy was understanding these laws through inductive reasoning, finding a single unifying explanation for a phenomenon. This became an authoritative statement with wide influence on science, particularly at the University of Cambridge where it inspired the student Charles Darwin with "a burning zeal" to contribute to this work. He arrived in Cape Town on 15 January 1834 and set up a private 21 ft telescope. Amongst his other observations during this time was that of the return of Comet Halley. Herschel himself thought catastrophic extinction and renewal "an inadequate conception of the Creator" and by analogy with other intermediate causes, "the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process". When HMS Beagle called at Cape Town, Captain Robert FitzRoy and the young naturalist Charles Darwin visited Herschel on 3 June 1836. Later on, Darwin would be influenced by Herschel's writings in developing his theory advanced in The Origin of Species. In the opening lines of that work, Darwin writes that his intent is "to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers", referring to Herschel. Herschel returned to England in 1838, was created a baronet and published Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope in 1847.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy is one of seven early 19th century science books described in James Secord's Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (2014). "Science was pervasively bound up with defining and maintaining canons of behaviour, from cultivating appropriate modes for discussion to encouraging the avoidance of outright fraud. Spelt out for the first time in an accessible book at an affordable price, these qualities could now provide a foundation for good character across the social spectrum. The Preliminary Discourse is thus seen as the expression of a set of precepts relating to scientific method, with positions uneasily poised between those of the metropolitan empiricist John Stuart Mill on the one hand and the idealist Master of Trinity College, William Whewell, on the other. As a philosophical work advocating induction from particular facts to general theories, the book is also seen to underwrite a hierarchical vision of social organization within science, in which networks of observers pass their findings to a limited circle of authoritative specialists. The first issue, of over 7,000 copies, sold out in a few months. 2,000 more were printed in March 1831, and 2,000 more in June. The years 1832 and 1833 saw further issues of 2,000, and the imprint dates of further issues show that the work sold well for many years--at least until the middle of the nineteenth century and later than that in the United States. The Preliminary Discourse recommends that we be constantly aware of our sensory limitations. Previous opinions need not be abandoned, but they cannot be considered as dogmas, and we must be willing to consider instances to the contrary."