Lot 457: Rey, Jean

Rey, Jean
Essays de Iean Rey... sur la recherche de la cause pour laquelle l'estain et le plomb augmentent de poids quand on les calcine (ed. Nicolas Gobet). Paris; Chez Ruault, 1777
8vo (7 9/16 x 4 7/8 in.; 195 x 124 mm). One full-page engraved text illustration. Contemporary mottled calf, smooth spine gilt, red morocco lettering piece, marbled endpapers and edges; joints dry and rubbed. Red morocco folding case.
AN IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY OF THE SECOND, AND VIRTUALLY ONLY OBTAINABLE EDITION, OWNED BY THE CELEBRATED FRENCH CHEMIST ANTOINE LAVOISIER. Rey's treatise contains the first published observations on the increase of the weight of metals in calcination and the role air played in it--anticipating Lavoisier's own findings by some 150 years--as well as a refutation of the phlogiston theory. The impetus for the Essays was an enquiry by the Bordeaux apothecary Pierre Brun, as to why tin and lead increased in weight when heated. Lavoisier at first thought the work to be a forgery but by 1792 he wrote a highly appreciative account of it in his own Memoires de chimie.
Rey's work first appeared in 1630 but was already so rare by the eighteenth century that Gobet published a new edition augmented with a new preface, footnotes, and a letter by the chemist Pierre Bayen (who first drew attention to the Essays in 1775), correspondence between Rey and Mersenne; an essay on air by Moitrel d'Element, and extracts from Cherubin d'Orleans essay on glass. Of the first edition fewer than seven copies are known to exist; of the second edition, only one copy--the Honeyman copy sold in our London rooms in 1980-- has appeared at American or English auctions. No more than seven copies have been recorded in American institutions.
References: Duveen 505; Honeyman sale 6:2628; Partington 2:631-636
Provenance: Antoine Lavoisier (engraved armorial bookplate, shelfmark, and signature on verso of front free endpaper)