21
Cometographie de Pingre.
2. v. in 1.
4
to.
1815 Catalogue, page 115, no. 31, as above.
PINGRÉ,
Alexandre Gui.
Cométographie; ou, Traité historique et théorique des comètes. Par M. Pingré, Chanoine Régulier & Bibliothécaire de Sainte-Geneviève, Chancelier de l’Université de Paris, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences.
Tome Premier [-Second.]
A
Paris: de
l’Imprimerie Royale,
m. dcclxxxiii,
iv.
[1783, 4.]
QB721 .P63
First Edition. 2 vol. in 1. 4to. 322 and 263 leaves, engraved plates,
Fautes à corriger at the end of the first volume.
Quérard, VII, 180.
Not in Lalande.
Houzeau, page 752, no. 2776.
Jefferson’s copy was bound in one volume; his entry on the undated manuscript catalogue calls for
2. v. 4to. in 1 and includes the price,
24.0.
Alexandre Gui Pingré, 1711-1796, French astronomer.
[3800]
22
Exposition du systeme du monde par la Place.
2. v.
8
vo.
1815 Catalogue, page 115, no. 7, as above.
LA PLACE,
Pierre Simon, Marquis de.
Exposition du Systeme du Monde; Par Pierre-Simon Laplace . . . Tome Premier [-Second].
Paris: Imprimerie du
Cercle-social, l’an
IV. [1796.]
First Edition. 2 vol. 8vo., engraved portrait; no copy was available for collation.
Quérard IV, 546.
Not in Lalande.
Houzeau, page 19, no. 141.
Jefferson ordered a copy from
N. G. Dufief in a letter dated from Washington, April 10, 1802, to which Dufief replied from Philadelphia on April 14, referring to the work as “l’exposition du Systeme du monde par le profond Géomètre
La Place.”
In 1809 James Monroe sent Jefferson a copy. In a letter dated from Albemarle, on July 18 of that year, Monroe wrote: “Jas Monroe’s best respects to Mr. Jefferson. He has the pleasure to send him the
Edinburg review
which Mr Jefferson expressed a desire to peruse. JM. has also the pleasure to send to Mr Jefferson a copy of La Place’s systeme
du Monde, which he brought for him in 97. from France, it being a work then recently published which he presumed had not found
a place in his library. J M begs Mr Jefferson’s acceptance of this work. He would have sent it to him long since had it not
been packed with other books which the want of room prevented his opening.”
Jefferson mentioned this work in a letter to John Adams, dated from Monticello on March 21, 1809: “
I am indebted to you for mr Bowditch’s very learned mathematical papers, the calculations of which are not for every reader,
altho’ their results are readily enough understood. one of these impairs the confidence I had reposed in La Place’s demonstration
that the excentricities of the planets of our system could oscillate only within narrow limits, and therefore could authorise
no inference that the system must, by it’s own laws, come one day to an end. this would have left the question of infinitude,
at both ends of the line of time, clear of physical authority . . .
”
As early as July 1788, in a letter to the Rev. James Madison of William and Mary College, Jefferson had mentioned one of the
theories of La Place: “
. . . M. de la Place has discovered that the secular acceleration and retardation of the moon’s motion is occasioned by the
action of the sun, in proportion as his eccentricity changes, or, in other words, as the orbit of the earth increases or diminishes.
so that this irregularity is now perfectly calculable . . .
”
Pierre Simon, Marquis de La Place, 1749-1827, French mathematician and astronomer, known as the “Newton of France.”
[3801]
