Métrologie ou tables pour servir à l'intelligence des poids et mesures des anciens et principalement à déterminer la valeur des monnoies grecques et romaines d'après leur rapport avec les poids, les mesures et le numéraire actuel de la France

ROME DE L'ISLE Jean-Baptiste Louis

Published by Paris Chez Didot jeune imprimeur de Monsieur, 1789

About this Item

In-4. XXXXV, [3], 214, [1]p. 4 folding tables. Bound in original 3/4 brown calf marbled boards. French chronographer born on August 29, 1736 in Gray and died on March 7, 1790 in Paris. He studied humanities at the College of Ste. Barbe in Paris. At the age of twenty he entered the Royal Artillery and Engineering Corps, and left for the French Indies, staying in Pondicherry from 1758 to 1761. On this last date he was taken prisoner by the English and taken to China, where he spent three years. Upon returning to Paris in 1764, he devoted himself to the study of natural sciences and published two years later a work on freshwater polyps. But Romé soon became more fond of the topics of mineralogy. He had known and attended chemistry courses taught by the chemist and mineralist B. G. Sage. On his recommendation, Romé was in charge of drawing up the catalog of Pedro Franco Dávila's collections in 1767. This work, entitled Systematic and reasoned Catalog of curiosities of nature and art, published in Paris that same year, contained, together with the text of the three volumes, which compose it, thirty plates referring to crustaceans, mollusks and other animals, but also rocks, since Dávila, in accordance with the conception of the cabinets of the time, collected minerals, medals, coins and many other objects. All went to the Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, of which Dávila would later be appointed director. In the second volume, following Linnaeus, Romé stressed the importance of the crystalline form of minerals. Among the works devoted to establishing equivalences between the different measurement systems, that of Romé de l'Isle is one of the most peculiar for its method and, surely, one of those that had a more unfortunate fate because the month after it was published the French Revolution, which modified the interest in the matter of systems of measures to the adoption of a unified system since Tayllerand proposed in 1790 its adoption by law to combat feudal prerogatives in the determination and management of the transformations between measures in the purchase- sale and taxes. The peculiarity of its content comes from its author was a mineralogist and applied to his research the use of scientific calculation. Codbos.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1621014617418

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Métrologie ou tables pour servir à l'intelligence des poids et mesures des anciens et principalement à déterminer la valeur des monnoies grecques et romaines d'après leur rapport avec les poids, les mesures et le numéraire actuel de la France
• Publisher: Paris Chez Didot jeune imprimeur de Monsieur
• Publication Date: 1789
• Binding: Encuadernación de tapa dura
• Condition: Muy bien