SIMON, Jean-Baptiste: Le gouvernement admirable ou la Républ - Lot 225

Lot 225
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400 - 500 EUR
SIMON, Jean-Baptiste: Le gouvernement admirable ou la Républ - Lot 225
SIMON, Jean-Baptiste: Le gouvernement admirable ou la République des abeilles, et les moyens d'en tirer une grand utilité. Paris, chez Nyon, MDCCLVIII (1758), third edition, revised, corrected, and considerably enlarged, large in-12, red half-chagrin with "mustard" morocco strip, author and title on grey cloth spine, marbled paper endpapers in the reds, modern binding, XLII - 410 - (4) pp, headband speckled and trimmed, body and tail untrimmed, one folding frontispiece and five folding plates in intaglio, headbands and tailpieces, 3 pp. of "King's privilege" and 1 pp. of "approval" of 1734 - 1740 - 1753, at the end of the volume a table of chapter titles. The author, lawyer at the Parliament and Royal censor in Paris, gives us to compare the organization of a beehive with the ideal organization of a democratic government. Two possible readings: a pamphlet on royalty or a very thorough study on the life, organization and production of a beehive. It is as much about "the inclination of bees to work" as it is about "the destruction of insects harmful to the hive", but also about "how to prevent a swarm from returning to the mother-hive, after it has been separated from it" and about "ways of taking advantage of bees without suffocating them". It is in the editions of 1742 and 1758 that the author challenges the observations, however exact, of Réaumur whose work developed in his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes (1740) had then been abundantly distributed in Europe. Although praising the qualities of the research, texts and illustrations proposed by the latter, Simon expressed doubts about the nature of the monarchy in the hive and was skeptical about the mother bee and the mode of reproduction. The author believed in a monarchy involving a king and a queen. The conclusions were supported at the time by Voltaire, himself a passionate beekeeper. The edition is illustrated with a frontispiece drawn and engraved by Tardieu and 5 folding plates engraved by Tardieu after Mazelin. Very beautiful folding plates explaining the manipulation of the hive and the bees. Complete of the 6 plates. VERY RARE. Ref : de Castejau, Bibliographie d'apiculture n° 1438. The edition is here the most complete and best illustrated. Very good condition, as much for the binding as for the paper and plates.
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