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Uncommon first edition of the first article by a woman published in the Proceedings of the AAAS: a well-preserved copy in the original wrappers, with the ownership signature of American ornithologist George N. Lawrence (1806-1895), listed as a member of the AAAS on p. xxxviii of this volume. The American scientist, inventor, and women's rights campaigner Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888) is best remembered for her discovery of the absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide and water vapour: namely, the greenhouse effect. Her famous paper on the topic was presented to the AAAS in August 1856, read on her behalf by Joseph Henry (first Secretary of the Smithsonian), and published shortly after in the American Journal of Science and Arts. This is Foote's second paper, which provides an early, experimental description of the effect of a pressure-driven change on the static electricity of air, with reference to observations by Humboldt, Sabine, and de Saussure. It was presented to the AAAS on 14 August 1857, again read by Joseph Henry on her behalf. Its first appearance in print was in the Proceedings; abbreviated versions later appeared in the American Journal of Science and Arts and in the Philosophical Magazine. In Mary Creese's landmark study of American and British women scientists from 1800 to 1900, she noted that, of the approximately 3,400 scientific publications authored by women in the period - less than 1% of the total published - there were "just 16 papers by American women in physics over the whole century. Only two pre-date 1889, and they are the two papers by Eunice Foote" (Jackson, p. 117). John Perlin, author and visiting scholar at the UCSB Physics department which hosted a 2019 exhibition on Foote, remarked that she was "the only woman to be published in serious physics journals until Madame Curie" (quoted in Jacobs). Roland Jackson, "Eunice Foote, John Tyndall and a Question of Priority", Notes and Records, 74, 2019, pp. 105-18; Tom Jacobs, "More than a Historical Foote Note", UCSB's The Current, 6 November 2019, available online. Octavo. Five folding plates (one engraved with astronomical illustrations, the rest featuring diagrams and graphs) and two engraved plates, numerous illustrations in text. Original buff printed wrappers. Faint pencilled signature, "Geo. N. Lawrence", along upper edge of front cover, pencilled number at centre of spine. Wrappers expertly restored, spine ends chipped, contents crisp and clean: a very good copy.
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