JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The turner's workshop, from Charles Plumier's L'Art de Tourner, ou de Faire en Perfection Toutes Sortes d'Ouvrages au Tour...and published in 1701. It is spartan except for a large selection of in-place tools, and I can just about hear the room's echoes. The title page for the work is also quite lovely, a piece of airy/baroque, featuring elements of the turner's trade as ornamentation.
As it runs out M. Plumier's beautful fascination with turning was only a side-attraction to his life's work, which was botany. Plumier published a number of significant works with a particular emphasis on the botany of America, including: Description des plantes de l'Amérique (Paris, 1693) and Nova plantarum americanarum genera (Paris, 1703-04), "with 40 plates; in this work about one hundred genera, with about seven hundred species, were redescribed". "At a later date Linnæus adopted in his system, almost without change, these and other newly described genera arranged by Plumier. Plumier left a work in French and Latin ready to be printed entitled Traité des fougères de l'Amérique (Paris, 1705), which contained 172 excellent plates. The publication Filicetum Americanum (Paris, 1703), with 222 plates, was compiled from those already mentioned....At his death Plumier left thirty-one manuscript volumes containing descriptions, and about 6000 drawings, 4000 of which were of plants, while the remainder reproduced American animals of nearly all classes, especially birds and fish." (Quoted parts from the Catholkic Encyclopedia.)
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