THE WORLD.

...and the reason for it is easy to guess: the small volume of The World, which had just been published, mentions that Jacques Le Gras, the printer, shared his privilege In the 17th century, a "privilege" was a royal license granting exclusive rights to print and sell a specific book for a set number of years, acting as an early form of copyright. with Michel Bobin, Nicolas Le Gras, and Théodore Girard, "to enjoy it according to the agreement made between them." But Théodore Girard is precisely the name of the printer we find at the head of the volume of Man: to also print the Treatise on Light in the same volume in 1664 would have abruptly stopped the sale of the small octavo A book size where each sheet is folded into eight leaves (16 pages); these were typically smaller, more portable, and more affordable volumes. copies, which offered this Treatise separately, and which, having only recently appeared, were still far from being sold out.

But thirteen years later, in a second edition in 1677, there were no longer the same reasons to hold back, and the volume bears this new title: MAN by RENÉ DESCARTES, and the FORMATION OF THE FETUS, with the Remarks of Louis de la Forge. To which has been added THE WORLD, or TREATISE ON LIGHT, by the same Author. (In Paris, at the house of Michel Bobin & Nicolas Le Gras, 1677. original: "M. DC. LXXVII." Quarto, A larger book format where each sheet is folded twice to form four leaves (8 pages). 511 pages. Plus 66 pages of the Epistle and Preface, unpaginated.) Man, pp. 1-98. The Description of the Human Body (or Formation of the Fetus), pp. 99-154. Remarks by Louis de la Forge, pp. 155-368. Translation of the Preface by Monsieur Schuyl, Florentius Schuyl (1619–1669) was a Dutch physician who produced the first Latin edition of Descartes' "Man" in 1662. pp. 369-404. The World, pp. 405-511. Plus 8 pages of the Table of Contents. Clerselier did not reproduce the text published in 1664 for The World, which was only a copy, but, naturally, the one he had in his possession—that is to say, the original.

These are the four documents, all printed, that we will use to publish both the Treatise on Light and the Treatise on Man.

First, we will publish them one after the other, beginning with the Treatise on Light. Not only do Clerselier's statements authorize us to do so, but they do not allow us to do otherwise. The original Manuscript of the Treatise on Man, which he offered to show to anyone who wished, was, in fact, titled, he says: Chapter 18. In truth, the Treatise on Light, as he gives it to us, only contains...