Historical and Critical Library of Rare Physical and Medical Books

COLLECTION ONE. 7

...for the praise of God and the common utility of students, collected most accurately from the books of Philosophers.

A work of learned antiquity, which, although I know it to be in the hands of very few, I wonder all the more that it has been commemorated by none of the writers of rare books until now. For it appeared at the beginning of the 16th Century at Leipzig, as the words written at the bottom of the book testify: This work was printed and finished at Leipzig, by the Bachelor Wolfgang of Munich, (otherwise Stoecklin), in the year of our salvation 1501. Behold the first cause of its rarity, where at the same time we note the error committed by Mercklin in the Renovated Lindenius original: "Lindenio renovato" p. 770, who asserts that this book appeared at the press of Marcus Brandt. But since all the copies I have seen so far appeared at the press of Wolfgang of Munich, that excellent glory of Leipzig typographers, and none at the press of Brandt, as Lindenius thinks; and since the most learned and most fortunate investigator of the ancient state of Leipzig typography, the late JOHN HENRY LEICH original: "IOH. HEINR. LEICHIVS", in his learned Commentary on the Origin and Growth of Leipzig Typography, pages 24 and 79, makes mention of our edition indeed, but not the Brandtian one; I do not doubt at all that I accuse Mercklin of error, who perhaps never saw the book himself. I have found this work three times so far. For it exists in the Riviniana Library, no. 2540, the Platneriana, Vol. II, Part I, no. 2267, and the Menziana recently sold at Leipzig, no. 2176. Perhaps, however, this is one and the same edition,