SINCE the public has been showing an increasing interest in the activities of the various government departments during recent years, the practical value of the work of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., has become better recognized. The library of this institution, however, has remained comparatively little known beyond the circle of its regular readers and too little used by research students. This is due in part, probably, to its scientific character and to its situation off the main path of tourists and even of Washington residents. Most of the visitors come at night to look through the telescopes and do not see the library. As a matter of fact, this library contains much of interest to the casual visitor as well as to the earnest student of astronomy or mathematics.
A purchase of 700 volumes of English, French, and German standard scientific publications added to a gift of 200 volumes from noted foreign observatories and libraries a year or so after the Observatory was organized in 1843, gave this library its beginning. Since that time careful attention has been given to the accumulation of valuable works, early and modern, until at present the bound volumes number about 36,000 and the unbound pamphlets about 8,000. Wise expenditure of the limited appropriations granted for the purchase of books has been amply supplemented by the accession of periodicals and monographs through exchange. In return for the publications of the Naval Observatory there are received publications of other observatories and scientific institutions in this country and in twenty-seven foreign countries.
Thus have been developed priceless sets, many of them complete from the earliest volumes to the current issues. The long foreign sets include the Nautical Almanac of Great Britain (complete, 1766 to date), Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch of Germany (complete, 1774 to date), Connaissance des Temps of France (1771 to date), Almanaque Nautico of Spain (1841 to date); and publications of the Royal Society of London (complete, 1665 to date), Akademie der Wissenschaften of Berlin (complete, 1746 to date), Academie des Sciences of Paris (complete, 1733 to date), and Academy of Sciences of Russia (1728 to date).
While these periodical series furnish a background of general science, an attempt is made to acquire and keep mainly works on astronomy and mathematics. The Library of Congress looks to the Naval Observatory Library to specialize in these two subjects in the great scheme of interlibrary cooperation. The result is an astronomical collection conceded to be the most complete in the world, with one exception, a library in Russia. The collection of mathematical works is internationally known and respected. Students working for doctorates are most enthusiastic over the facilities available here for studying higher mathematics.
This practical part of the library, which brings the scientific information up to the very latest printed word, is well balanced by an assemblage of over 400 early books printed before 1800. About half of these were printed between 1482 and 1700 and include many first editions and rare copies. Early editions of scientific works are intensely interesting in their physical make-up and are most valuable historically because they represent the stage to which civilization had progressed up to the time they were written.
Advanced students know from bibliographies and notes of reference the sources which must be searched in the quest of new material. Therefore, without further special reference to the value of the modem and current material available, attention is invited to the old printed treasures which bring joy to booklovers and spontaneous interest to others. The most practical person, avowedly without interest in antiques, cannot restrain the thrill that comes with the study of early books. There is a feeling of reverence connected with the idea of those old manuscripts, written by eager students of the very earliest centuries and later brought to light to be given to the world after the invention of printing. The fact that a primitive kind of printing existed for many centuries makes one marvel that the invention of printing from movable types should have been delayed in Europe until the middle of the fifteenth century.
Very little is known about the prices of these early books and the cost of printing them. It is known that many branches of industry joined in the making; one man probably wrote the book, another supplied the rubrics (titles or directions in red), a third inserted the initial letters and borders, and others the general groundwork and the rest. Some of the books have spaces left for the initial letters which were never inserted.
The earliest books have no title-page. At the end of the text is a colophon, or brief statement of the place and time of publication and sometimes the name of the printer. Not until between 1480 and 1485 did the systematic development of the title-page begin. At first there seemed to be the custom of printing a short title on the first page, then filling in the blank space beneath the title with an illustration or printer’s mark, the author’s name being hidden in the preface or colophon. Later the title- page became a fine piece of work ornamented with wood cuts. Wood-cut borders often surround the first page of the text and pictorial initial letters and large ornamental tailpieces appear frequently through the body of the book. Pagination, use of the letters of the alphabet for designation of signatures, and headings, believed to have been used first about 1470, had come into common use when the earliest book of the Naval Observatory collection was printed in 1482. Most early books are printed in Latin.
Two other interesting features of the make-up of these early books are the paper on which they are printed and the bindings. The paper is strong and durable, apparently made from rags by the old and intricate hand process of beating them into fibers and pulp. The age of the bindings is harder to judge. Some of them seem to be the original. If they are not, they are very old. Bindings of vellum that has become stiff and crackly or that has softened with age, those of leather either smooth and straight, or ornamented with tooling and gilt, and those of paper boards covered with old manuscripts, all are represented in this collection. Some still have clasps to hold the covers in place; others show signs of having had some kind of band. Many have been repaired by experts who have tried to reproduce the worn ornamentation. Stains and worn parts cause speculation as to how these old treasures have been valued and treated by former owners. Some contain bookplates and many bear the names of foreign booksellers.
The incunabula, as books printed in the fifteenth century are termed, are always most interesting. The very earliest in the collection at the Naval Observatory is a first edition of Poeticon Astronomicon (1482), by Hyginus, illustrated by Ratdoldt, who was one of the four most important printers in Venice at the last of the fifteenth century. There are first editions of Flores Album- asaris (1488), Introductorium in Astronomia (1489), and De Magnis Coniunctionibus (1489), all by Albumasar, an Arab astronomer of the ninth century, who maintained in the last book named that the world, created when the seven planets were in conjunction in the first degree of Aries, will come to an end at a like conjunction in the last degree of Pisces. Ratdoldt used the same wood cuts in these books that he had used in the one by Hyginus. A book of tables, prepared at the instance of Alfonso X of Spain, bears the information that it was printed at Venice in 1492. The book attracting most attention is that of Paciuoli, entitled Suma de Arithmetica Geomctria Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494), known as the first work printed on arithmetic and according to De Morgan, the first work printed on algebra. The figures and calculations are in wood cuts in the margins. The binding, seemingly the original, has been cleverly repaired.
Included in this valuable collection are the writings of mathematicians and astronomers who lived in the first centuries, b.c., as Aristarchus, famous for having been first to hold the principle that the earth moves around the sun; Aratus, a Greek poet, who knew little astronomy but wrote poetry which attracted the attention of astronomers; Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of ancient times, noted for his inventions, and quoted as saying in connection with his discovery of the principle of the lever, “Give me where I may stand and I will move the earth”; Apollonius, whose brilliant work on conic sections caused him to be known as the “Great Geometer”; and Hipparchus, the greatest astronomer of antiquity, who is credited with the founding of trigonometry and the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes.
Noted authors representing the period of the first to the fifteenth centuries include Pliny the Second, whose writings are not scientific but are valuable to show the progress of astronomy; Ptolemy, a celebrated Egyptian astronomer, known for his Almagest, which formed the foundation of astronomy until the time of Copernicus; Diophantus, the only Greek mathematician who specialized in algebra; Pappus, the last of the great mathematicians of the Alexandrian school; Eutocius, whose commentaries form a history of Greek learning; Albategnius, Arab prince and astronomer of highest rank, who was the first to prepare a table of cotangents; Copernicus, Polish astronomer, who, dissatisfied with Ptolemaic doctrines, elaborated an entirely new system; and Ulugh Beg, Persian astronomer, who made the first original catalogue of fixed stars after the time of Ptolemy.
The sixteenth century brought increasing numbers of mathematicians and astronomers. The results of former scientists were being made available through the new art of printing. Some of the best known of the writers of this century who are represented in this collection are Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer, who, while a student of philosophy at Copenhagen, marveled at the punctual occurrence of a total eclipse of the Sun at the predicted time and became so interested in astronomy that he studied it secretly until his guardian uncle died and he was allowed to have an observatory of his own; John Napier, Scottish mathematician and inventor of logarithms; Henry Briggs, English mathematician, who continued Napier’s work on logarithms and tables; Clavius, geometer, whose calendar was adopted in place of the Julian calendar (Gregorian calendar in Naval Observatory Library copy is worked out from a.d. 1600 to 5000); Thomas Digges, whose writings raised the standards of other writers on astronomy; Galileo, Italian astronomer, who was first to appreciate the value of the newly invented telescope for astronomy and who overthrew the idea of Aristotle that heavy bodies fall faster than lighter ones, an idea which had persisted for nearly twenty centuries; Edmund Gunter, inventor of navigational instruments; Kepler, German astronomer, best known for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion; and Rheticus, who calculated a table of sines and began tables of tangents and secants which were completed and published by Otho in 1596 (it is believed that the copy in the Naval Observatory is the only perfect copy in the United States).
The seventeenth century authors include: Isaac Barrow, English professor of geometry, considered by his English contemporaries a mathematician second only to Newton (the first edition of his work in this collection is very rare) ; Ludolph van Ceulen, who carried the value of x to thirty-five places, causing the value of this symbol to be called “Ludolph’s number”; Descartes, French philosopher, who interested himself in the development of better optical instruments; Fermat, French mathematician, who ranks as founder of the modern theory of numbers; Hevelius, German astronomer, called founder of lunar topography (the second part of his Machina Coelestis, 1679, in the Naval Observatory collection, is extremely rare); Robert Hooke, originator of the idea of using the pendulum as a measure of gravity; Huygens, Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, who discovered a satellite and the rings of Saturn and who applied the use of the pendulum to regulate the movement of clocks in order to get exact measure of time in observing the heavens; Sir/ Isaac Newton, inventor of the method of fluxions which he kept secret until the publication of his Principia; and Torricelli, Italian physicist and mathematician, who discovered the principle of the barometer in 1643.