Elements of Natural Philosophy

Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1827. Hardcover. Very Good. First American edition. Edited by John Farrar. Quarter cloth gilt and papercovered boards. Dampstain tidemarks on some pages (most pronounced in the final quarter of the book), one corner of the boards worn through, still a tight, very good copy. Ownership Signature of Joseph Ray. Ray was a professor of mathematics and wrote several books on the subject, beginning in 1834 with *An Introduction to Ray's Eclectic Arithmetic,* the first of a series of six textbooks which became the most popular and widely used American mathematics textbooks of the Nineteenth Century. They also formed the basis for *Ray's Mathematical Series* of textbooks. As late as 1913, annual sales exceeded a quarter of a million copies a year, and total sales of the arithmetic books alone are estimated at 120 million copies. The success of Ray's *Arithmetic* series prompted his publisher to seek an author for a set of readers. They chose William Holmes McGuffey, who joined Ray on the faculty of Woodward College, and where he wrote the *McGuffey Readers* which surpassed even Ray's *Arithmetic* to become the most popular textbooks ever written.