La Société d'Arcueil | Mémoires de Physique et de Chimie, from a French learned society comprised of a notable group of scientists

Société d'Arcueil

Mémoires de Physique et de Chimie de la Société d'Arcueil. Paris: J.J. Bernard, Mme. Veuve Bernard, and Mme. Veuve H. Perronneau, 1807, 1809, and 1817

3 volumes (all published), 8vo (198 x 120 mm). Half-titles, 3 engraved plates, 3 folding tables, and additional tables in text, with pagination and imposition errors as usual; occasional light spotting and toning, mostly affecting the first and last few leaves in each volume, volume III with a pale dampstain to the lower corner of about 15 leaves, and a short marginal tear in the final leaf of the text. Contemporary olive calf, gilt ruled and lettered, boards with central gilt-stamped emblem of the “Academie de Paris—Prix du Concours General,” all edges gilt; some scuffing and discoloration, extremities rubbed, with hinges and joints of Vol. I starting or cracked but holding soundly.

The Société d'Arcueil, founded in 1807 by Claude-Louis Berthollet and Pierre-Simon Laplace, was a short-lived French learned society comprised of a small yet select group of scientists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac, Etienne Louis Malus, and Jean-Baptiste Biot, among others. It was housed in its founders’ houses, both located in Arcueil, a village just south of Paris, where they provided a library and laboratory for the society's members. They would also host regular meetings where members presented their research and findings.

Between 1807 and 1817 the Société published these three scarce volumes containing 61 Mémoires on a variety of subjects, including gas physics, botany, magnetism, mineral chemistry, and much more. Among the most notable contributions are “sur la combinaison des substances gazeuses,” which sets forth Gay Lussac’s law of volumes of gasses, and Malus’ “sur une propriété de la lumière réfléchie,” which contains the discovery of the polarization of light by reflection. 

“Duveen states incorrectly that the third volume of the Memoires is usually found lacking pages 513-613. A survey of the institutions listed in the National Union Catalog as holding copies of this work revealed no incomplete copies of Vol. III; however, the misfolding of signature 32 (noted above) is common to a number of copies” (The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, Vol. II, 1991, n° 1971). 

REFERENCES

Duveen, pp. 25-26; Partington, III, p. 499; Norman, II, 1971

PROVENANCE

Académie de Paris prize binding — Haskell F. Norman (bookplate in vol I; Christie’s New York, 15 June 1998, lot 364, part) — private collection (Sotheby’s Paris, 9 November 2011, lot 6)