L'art des mines, avec un traité des exhalaisons minerales ou moufettes & plusieurs mémoires sur différens sujets d'histoire naturelle. Essai d'une histoire naturelle des couches de la terre, avec des considérations physiques sur les causes des tremblemens de terre & de leur propagation

Paris, Jean-Thomas Hérissant, 1759. Three octavo volumes.

First edition in French of Johann Gottlob Lehmann's Traités de physique, d'histoire naturelle, de minéralogie et de métallurgie, translated and annotated by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach. All three volumes bear this collective half-title and bring together in French for the first time several of the German scientist's principal works on mining, mineralogy, metallurgy and geology.

Illustrated with four figures in the first volume and six in the third, five of them folding. Volume I contains L'Art des mines, followed by the Traité des Moufettes, dealing with the harmful exhalations encountered underground, translated from the Latin of Zacharias Theobald and augmented with remarks by Lehmann, together with seven memoirs on various subjects in natural history. Volume II is devoted to the Traité de la formation des métaux et de leurs matrices ou minières. Volume III contains the Essai d'une histoire naturelle des couches de la terre, followed by Considérations physiques sur les causes des tremblemens de terre et de leur propagation.

Contemporary full mottled brown calf, spines with raised bands and gilt decoration, red morocco lettering-pieces, volume numbers gilt at foot. Some rubbing, particularly to the joints. Minor damage at the foot of the lower joint of volume III and a narrow 0.5 cm split at the head of the upper joint of volume I. Very faint occasional foxing. A handsome copy.

The progression of the three volumes almost naturally follows that of Lehmann's own investigations: from the mine being worked to the metal formed within it, and from the individual deposit to the entire architecture of the subterranean world.

Trained as a physician, Johann Gottlob Lehmann studied at Leipzig and Wittenberg, receiving his medical doctorate in 1741. While practising medicine for a time in Dresden, he increasingly devoted himself to chemistry, metallurgy and the observation of mining districts. After moving to Berlin in 1750, he travelled through the Harz and other mining regions, examining both deposits and methods of extraction. His work led to his appointment as mining councillor and election to the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1754.

L'Art des mines grew directly from this practical experience. Lehmann deals not merely with ores, but with the organisation of mines, the mountains in which deposits occur, methods of extraction and the phenomena encountered by miners underground. The Traité des Moufettes leads into the physical environment of the galleries themselves and the dangerous exhalations that could collect there. The accompanying natural-history memoirs already extend the investigation to volcanoes, mineral waters and the internal structure of the Earth.

The second volume continues this movement by examining the formation of metals and the matrices in which they occur. Lehmann constantly attempts to relate the evidence of chemical experiment to what the miner encounters in the ground. It is precisely this movement between mining practice, mineralogy and theory that gives his work its distinctive place in the mid-eighteenth-century Earth sciences. The Neue Deutsche Biographie emphasises his early systematic linking of geology and ore deposits with mining, metallurgy and chemistry.

With the Essai d'une histoire naturelle des couches de la terre, however, the scale of observation changes fundamentally. First published in German in 1756 as Versuch einer Geschichte von Flötz-Gebürgen, it examines the succession of stratified rocks and attempts to understand their formation through their relative position, composition and fossil contents. Lehmann distinguished ancient mountains cut by mineral veins from younger stratified formations and represented their succession in geological sections, turning individual strata into elements in a history of the Earth.

Lehmann did not single-handedly found stratigraphy, whose principles reach back to Steno and were being developed in different ways by contemporaries such as Füchsel and Arduino. His 1756 work nevertheless marks a decisive stage: the order of strata becomes not merely a local observation but a means of comparing formations and reconstructing their succession. Mining had opened sections through the ground; Lehmann turned those sections into documents from which the Earth's past could be read.

The French edition adds to this history of strata the Considérations physiques sur les causes des tremblemens de terre, first published in German at Berlin in 1757. The work opens by recalling an earthquake which, more than a year earlier, had caused alarm throughout a large part of Europe. The reference points very strongly to the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, whose effects were felt across an enormous area and which prompted an outpouring of investigations into the physical causes of earthquakes. Lehmann's treatise belongs directly to this moment when catastrophe itself was becoming an object of natural inquiry.

The French translation adds another layer to this circulation of scientific knowledge. Although the translator remained anonymous on the title pages, modern bibliography and the Bibliothèque nationale de France firmly identify him as the Baron d'Holbach. Long before the Système de la nature, d'Holbach devoted a substantial part of his activity to making German scientific literature available in French, particularly in mineralogy, metallurgy and chemistry. The "notes by the translator" announced in the present volumes are therefore his as well.

Lehmann himself would subsequently move eastward. In 1760 he accepted a salaried position at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, arriving the following year as Professor of Chemistry and Director of its natural-history cabinet. He continued his scientific work and exploratory travels in Russia until his death in 1767.

A handsome copy in contemporary bindings of this first French edition translated by d'Holbach. From the mine gallery to the strata composing the mountains, and finally to the shocks capable of shaking a continent, these three volumes capture the moment when the practical investigation of the underground world began to become a physical history of the Earth.