The Earliest Books at the University of London: A Supplement

Abstract

In 2016 I published an article in the pages of this journal reconstructing the donation of the Ilfracombe medical practitioner Nathaniel Vye to the University of London in 1838, the first bulk gift of early printed books to the new University. 1 The donation had been described as constituting 185 volumes, 2 several of which were components of multivolume works. My reconstruction comprised 98 titles (including several multivolume works), of which 73 were marked as having been Vye's and 23 could confidently be deduced as having been Vye's.Two further titles were required to complete the list, and three titles from the University of London Library's catalogue seemed plausible candidates. 3 I noted a margin for error, 4 and in 2018 a further title which was definitely part of the Vye gift indeed emerged, with the pencilled note 'N. Vye, 1 Vol.' on the verso of the front flyleaf to prove its provenance. The purpose of this note is to describe that volume and its place within the collection in a correction of my former article.The volume in question is by the classicist, Biblical critic and late-Enlightenment philosopher Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), and is the second edition of his Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe, zum Erkenntniss des Zusammenhanges der Welt, des Schöpfers und unser selbst (Hamburg: Johann Carl Bohn, 1762). A physico-theological text combating materialism (especially that of his French contemporaries Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac), it differentiates between mankind and animals by arguing that animals act from God-given instinct, lacking the reason, and the skills acquired by experience and reason, which distinguish humans. Animal drives are divided into ten classes, subdivided into fifty-seven sub-classes. The book is a pioneering work on animal behaviour, the most extensive study of the subject to appear in the eighteenth century and the first critical work to do so. It reflects Reimarus's long-standing interest in the topic, deriving ultimately from a speech he gave as high school rector in Wismar in 1725, and developing the fifth section of his popular Die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion (1756), also in Vye's collection. The work was well received until the end of the eighteenth century, with four editions, two translations, and several positive reviews. As a book of its time, it fell out of public consciousness as