ISBN10: 9004070435, ISBN13: 9789004070431, [publisher: E. J. Brill and Leiden University Press] Hardcover VG condition book without dust jacket. Boards are clean with little wear. Book has clean and bright contents with the previous owners sticker on the ffep.
[Wallingford, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 1983]
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ISBN10: 9004070435, ISBN13: 9789004070431, [publisher: Leiden: Published for the Sir Thomas Browne Institute by E. J. Brill and Leiden University Press, 1983.] Hardcover First Edition English translation of original 1715 Latin edition. Frontispiece, viii, 374 pp. Original linen. Upper corner of front cover bumped, else Near Fine. The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page notes that Richard B. Schwartz' book, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison: 1971), argued 'rather convincingly that Johnson's biography of Boerhaave [1739] was central to understanding Johnson's attitudes towards progress and careful experimentation' (the biography was first printed in the January, February, March, and April 1739 issues of The Gentleman's Magazine). 'When he had laid down his office of governour of the university, in 1715, he made an oration upon the subject of 'attaining to certainty in natural philosophy;' in which he declares, in the strongest terms, in favour of experimental knowledge; and reflects, with just severity, upon those arrogant philosophers, who are too easily disgusted with the slow methods of obtaining true notions by frequent experiments; and who, possessed with too high an opinion of their own abilities, rather choose to consult their own imaginations, than inquire into nature, and are better pleased with the charming amusement of forming hypotheses, than the toilsome drudgery of making observations' (Johnson).