AVERTISSEMENT

Foreword/Notice

...Northern [parts]," original: "Septentrionales" that is to say, apparently as far as Sweden (unless it was simply Holland).

Shortly after, Clerselier Claude Clerselier (1614–1684) was Descartes’ brother-in-law and his primary literary executor. He dedicated years to organizing and publishing Descartes’ unfinished manuscripts. published a volume in his turn, which he had announced as early as the Preface to volume II of the Letters of Descartes in 1659. (See volume V of the present edition, pp. 635-636.) The printing was completed on April 12, 1664, under the title: MAN by RENÉ DESCARTES, & A TREATISE ON THE FORMATION OF THE FETUS original: "L'HOMME de RENÉ DESCARTES, & UN TRAITÉ DE LA FORMATION DU FŒTUS" by the same Author. With the Remarks of Louis de la Forge, Doctor of Medicine, residing at La Flèche, on the Treatise on Man by René Descartes, & on the Figures invented by him. (In Paris, at the house of Theodore Girard, 1664. Large quarto, 448 pages, plus 68 pages for an unpaginated Epistle and Preface.) Man, pp. 1-107. Formation of the Fetus, pp. 109-170. Remarks by Louis de la Forge, pp. 171-408. French translation of Schuyl's Preface to his Latin edition of 1662, pp. 409-448.

Clerselier, whose name does not appear in the title, but only at the bottom of the dedicatory Epistle "to Monseigneur de Colbert," Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), the powerful Minister of Finances under King Louis XIV and a great patron of the sciences. returns, at the beginning of his Preface, to the two previous editions of 1662 and 1664. He regrets that they were produced with too much haste. Regarding the Treatise on Man, Schuyl Florentius Schuyl, who published the first Latin version of "Man" in 1662. had only obtained copies, whereas Clerselier possessed the original, which certainly should have been printed first. From the very first lines, one would have seen that it was not a separate Treatise, but a sequel to the work of which Descartes speaks in his Discourse on Method and which he elsewhere calls his World original: "Monde". The chapters on Man must therefore come after those of the Treatise on Light, which form the first part of that work. Clerselier also regrets that the Treatise on Light was released too quickly in 1664, as he says he possessed "a more faithful text, with better-made figures," and he had intended to join it to the Treatise on Man in the same volume, since they were effectively two parts of the same whole. However, as we have seen, he did not do so in his 1664 publication.