Clarissimi viri D. De La Caille; Lectiones elementares opticae : ex editione Parisina anni MDCCLVI in latinum traductae / a C.S. e S.J ; quibus auctarii loco accessit Brevis theoria micrometri objectivi a R.P. Rogerio Josepho Boscovich, e S.J.

Vienna:: Joannis Thomae nob. de Trattnern, 1766., 1766. 4to. [viii], 150 pp. 13 folding engraved plates. Original [Viennese?] brown elaborately blind-stamped calf, all edges gilt; extremities worn. Final two blanks with manuscript notes, probably attributable to Keller. Signature of Georg Joseph Keller of Wurzburg, his manuscript notes at rear. Good. Second edition, translated from the French. "Elementary lessons in optics (1750), was a short but very popular textbook that was reprinted ten times, sometimes in other languages, until 1810, and is a fairly uncomplicated treatment of optics as then known, especially as applied to lenses, mirrors, eye glasses, telescopes and microscopes. Once again La Caille revealed himself to be a good Newtonian, even if classical corpuscles are no longer the whole story today. / 'Light is composed of a prodigious quantity of particles of matter or of corpuscles distinguished from each other, of infinitely small size, very elastic but with an extreme velocity so that when they arrive at the organ of our sight they hit with a force proportional to the density of corpuscles, which in virtue of the intimate union of our body with our soul, occasions in our spirit different ideas on the presence of objects from where the corpuscles or luminous atoms departed." – I.S. Glass, Nicolas-Louis De La Caille, Astronomer and Geodesist. / "The Abbe Lacaille was an immensely industrious observational astronomer whose career was climaxed by a scientific expedition to the Cape of Good Hope; his studies there made him "the father of southern astronomy," and his names for fourteen southern constellations remain as his most enduring monument." –Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume VII, p. 542. REFERENCES: Barchas 1193, Joseph Marie Querard, VI, 639.