Lectures on Select Subjects. Second Edition

Nice clean copy in original binding (later spine). Minor damp staining on edges of front thee pages. Foldout plates (23), all in very good condition. First published in 1764, this was one of the first books (printed in English) that dealt extensively with mechanics and hydraulics and went through numerous editions until well into the nineteenth century. The plates of machinery after Ferguson’s own drawings are attractive and skillfully executed. Supplement contains 13 engraved plates. James Ferguson (b. 1710, d. 1776), Scottish mechanician and astronomer, first learned-to read by overhearing his father teach his elder brother. He wrote various papers for the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1763, devised astronomical and mechanical models, and in 1748 began to give public lectures on experimental philosophy. It is as the inventor and improver of astronomical and other scientific apparatus, and as a striking instance of self-education, that he claims a place among the most remarkable men of science of his country. Ferguson’s principal publications are Astronomical Tables (1763), and Lectures on Select Subjects (1st Edition, 1761), Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), and Select Mechanical Exercises, with a Short Account of the Life of the Author (written by himself, 1773).…