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xv, 175, [1] pp, with frontispiece. Original cloth. Small tears at top & bottom of spine. Very Good. First Edition. SIGNED BY WILLIAM OSLER: "With Xmas greetings/ from/ Wm Osler/ 1916." In his Preface (p. vii), Sayle thanks Osler for his encouragement. Sayle offers quotations for each year of life, quoting from Osler's "The Fixed Period" for the age 60 (pp. 83-84): "My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age. . . ." Osler's "The Fixed Period" is also cited in a footnote for age 115 and Hermippus. Sayle's citation of Aequanimitas (1904) is incorrect, as Osler delivered the talk on February 22, 1905. It was reprinted in the second edition, 1906, of Aequanimitas (Golden & Roland 1179 and 1477). In a letter to Sayle in November 1916, Osler writes: "I send books at Xmas to about 100 of my old students, and this year I have selected your 'Ages' & the just-issued edition (trans.) of Galen's 'Natural Faculties'. Do not bother please--I can get them through ordinary channels" (Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler, II: 545). One of the copies was sent to J. Collins Warren to whom Osler wrote on December 4, 1916: "I have sent you an anthology of the Ages of Man, written by a friend, in which you may be interested. For 60, he has taken my rude remarks. Heavens! that was a long time ago!" (Cushing, ibid., II: 547). Sayle's book was kept by Osler for his own library: Bibliotheca Osleriana 5421. Sayle was an important figure in the initial stages of Osler's conception of the catalogue of his own library, as Cushing notes: "It would appear that the idea of the Bibliotheca Osleriana must have taken form while he [Osler] was browsing in the Pepys Library during this Cambridge visit. Mr. Charles Sayle of the Cambridge University Library, of whom he saw much at this time, became interested in the project, and they had many a subsequent exchange of visits in Oxford and Cambridge, during the course of which the plan of a 'Bibliotheca Prima', 'Bibliotheca Secunda', and so on, came to be crystallized. And innumerable letters on the subject during the coming months passed between the two (Cushing, ibid., II: 417)." More from Cushing about Sayle's role in the Bibliotheca Osleriana: II: 531 (1916): Osler writes to Sayle "The B. prima grows--in mind & in shelves." II: 571: (June-July 1917) "the following laconic messages are among many that passed to Charles Sayle of the University of Cambridge Library. 'When are you coming to pay us a visit and inspect the B.O.' II: 613 (August 1918): "While in Cambridge he stayed with Charles Sayle, and there must have been much talk about Bibliotheca Osleriana, some of the volumes in which show traces of this Cambridge visit. . . . His book purchases, indeed, as the late Charles Sayle recalled, left him so out of pocket that he had barely enough to buy this ticket home.". Seller Inventory # 16342
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