Beschreibung:

DELLA PORTA, Giovan Battista (c.1538-1615). De distillatione lib. IX . Rome: Camera Apostolica, 1608.
DELLA PORTA, Giovan Battista (c.1538-1615). De distillatione lib. IX . Rome: Camera Apostolica, 1608. 4° (216 x 157mm). Laudatory epigrams in Hebrew, Greek, Chaldean, Arabic, Slavonic, and Armenian, each with their Latin translations, 35 woodcut illustrations in text, woodcut initials and printer’s device. (Lacks the portrait of the author by I. Laurus, woodcut portrait of the author inserted instead, lightly browned, some leaves spotted.) Modern vellum. Provenance : part of margin of title and final leaf excised and repaired – bookseller’s label. FIRST EDITION. Della Porta's treatise gives the most comprehensive view of the applications of distillation in the sixteenth century. The work is an expansion of the section on distillation in Book X of the enlarged edition of his Magia naturalis (1589). The nine parts of De distillatione deal with the various kinds of distillation, including methods of extraction, the preparation of scented distilled waters, oils distilled from resins, oils distilled from woods, the distillation of corrosive mineral acids, the properties of these acids, distillation of alcohol from wine, and the preparation of various ointments. ‘Among the many fine woodcuts contained in the book, the most curious are those depicting pieces of apparatus likened to different animals’ (Duveen). Duveen, p. 481; Ferguson II, 216 (Strasbourg edition of 1609 'The Roman edition is a much finer book'); Norman 1725; Riccardi I(ii), 312.