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PRESENTATION COPY OF THE FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK ON THE LAWS OF PERCUSSION. First edition, presentation copy, of the first published book on the laws of percussion, and containing important hitherto unpublished material from the lectures of Galileo and Torricelli. Probably under the influence of Borelli (see below), Leopold, together with his brother Grand Duke Ferdinand, founded the Accademia del Cimento where Borelli first presented much of the experimental work on which this text is based. Although Leopold held Borelli in high esteem, Borelli s decision to publish this work in Bologna rather than as part of the proceedings of the Accademia led to a quarrel between the two men. "In this, Borelli s first book on mechanics, he quotes Galileo s youthful work on percussion, the fourth Dialogo, and lectures by Torricelli. As well as the detailed discussion of impact, the book deals with the dynamics of falling bodies, vibration, gravity, fluid mechanics, magnetism, and pendular motion … he gives the name resilience for the first time to a number of problems now classed under this name" (Roberts & Trent). This is "the earliest book on the laws of percussion, which undoubtedly influenced John Wallis who, in 1668, published his discovery of the laws governing the percussion of non-elastic bodies, and Christiaan Huygens, who deals with the percussion of elastic bodies in his treatise De motu corporum ex percussione, published in 1669" (Zeitlinger I, 174). Borelli regarded this work, together with his De motionibus naturalibus (1670), as necessary preparation for his masterpiece, De motum animalium (1680-81), on which he had worked since the early 1660s. No presentation copy located in auction records. Provenance: Presentation inscription in ink 'Vincentio de Ambra ab Authore donatus' at foot of title. Vincenzo d Ambra is mentioned in connection with Borelli in Storia di Reggio di Calabria . sino all'anno . 1797, p. 196; Bibliotheca Mechanica. "In May 1665, Cardinal Michelangelo Ricci, Roman correspondent and adviser to the Tuscan Court, wrote to Borelli s patron, Leopoldo de Medici, encouraging Borelli to apply himself to the composition of a treatise on motion. According to Ricci, motion was a particularly important topic since so many contemporaries, famed for their contributions to mathematics and philosophy, had dedicated so much time to the topic and had explained so many of nature s secrets. Borelli s initial response was that he was instead concentrating on a treatise on anatomy within which he would insert some words regarding collision of moving bodies. At some point in this discussion, seemingly prompted by an insistence from Ricci, Borelli decided to publish On the Force of Percussion independently from his main project. The intention of the book on colliding bodies was to establish crucial propositions concerning motion as a means of introducing issues related to human and animal movements. "The main problem in question, as Aristotle had put it, was to explain why a heavy axe, as an example, has virtually no effect when rested on a piece of wood but has a much greater impact when it is made to fall from a significant height. Aristotelians believed that the increased force is a result simply of the velocity of the movable; the velocity supposedly artificially increases the weight of the object. For Italian natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, the first point of reference in response to this Aristotelian position is the work carried out by Galileo concerned with motion and mechanics including percussion. In his Mechanics (c. 1590), Galileo claimed that to study percussion, one must consider that which has been seen to happen in all other mechanical operations, which is that the force, the resistance, and the space through which the motion is made respectively follow that proportion and obey those laws by which a resistance equal to the force will be moved by this force through an equal space and with equal velocit.
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