Nine Books on the Nature of Things

Note on the Text and Translation

The Governing Witness

The Latin copytext is De Natura Rerum Libri Novem, printed pages 198–271 in Operum Medico-Chimicorum sive Paradoxorum, Tomus Genuinus Sextus, Frankfurt, Collegium Musarum Palthenianarum, 1605. The governing copy is SUB Göttingen, 4 MED INST 44/75:2 (2) RARA, digitised as PPN578052199, VD17 7:698931L. Historical scans 182–255 form the complete continuous source sequence used for the work. A modern library cover in a generated PDF is not counted as a historical page.

The work begins partway down printed page 198, after the close of a different text, and ends partway through page 271, before another treatise. Those neighbouring works are outside this volume. Where two books share a source page, each passage’s locator identifies the actual printed page and digital scan; the boundary is determined by the text and its heading. Source acquisition alone has not been treated as proof of completeness: transcription, translation, marginal notes and closing material are accounted for through the reading passages.

Latin Presentation and English

The Latin is a readable normalised transcription. Long s is rendered as s; ligatures are expanded; u and v are regularised; ordinary abbreviations are expanded where the reading is secure; words divided only by a printed line ending are joined. Punctuation and paragraph divisions are lightly clarified to make the two languages usable together. Meaningful technical signs are retained. Significant doubtful readings, consequential errors or interpretive choices are discussed in local notes rather than silently repaired.

Running heads, catchwords, gathering signatures and ornamental initials are printing furniture. The original marginal notes are substantive and are retained as separately labelled Latin–English passages. Their location is linked to the surrounding source pages. A marginal summary and its neighbouring argument are both historical text, even where they do not say quite the same thing.

The English was made from this Latin witness. It aims to preserve distinctions in agency, condition, sequence and degree, rather than replace difficult processes with present-day recipes or chemical identifications. Names such as Archaeus, arcanum, mummia and tincture require contextual explanations. Mercury, sulphur and salt can designate principles as well as named substances; their uses are not reduced to one modern meaning across the entire work. English additions that explain a reading belong to the annotations.

Comparison and Editorial Responsibility

John French’s 1650 translation provides a later English comparison. The separate Nature title and the entire dedication preserved in the Text Creation Partnership transcription matter to that comparison: the familiar Gutenberg presentation omits those preliminaries. Original 1650 page numbering also jumps from 104 to 107; a later transcription’s renumbering is not evidence of lost text in the Latin witness. This edition does not claim an exhaustive collation of every German, Latin or English printing.

Claims about disease, bodily generation, poison, the effects of preparations and character inferred from appearance are translated as historical assertions. An explanatory note that identifies their historical setting does not certify the asserted effect. In particular, Book IX’s physiognomic and predictive judgements are not adopted as reliable means of evaluating people. The modern apparatus examines how an argument works and what its words mean, while keeping its voice distinct from the source.