Œuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens publiées par la Société Hollandaise des Sciences Tome Septième Correspondence 1670–1675

Abstract

SEVEN large quarto volumes of letters to and from Huygens have now been published; but the completion of the work is not yet in sight, as the volume before us only reaches the end of the year 1675, and Huygens lived till 1695. We may therefore probably look forward to three or four more volumes, making in all ten or eleven, before this undertaking is brought to a close. A future historian of science in the seventeenth century will no doubt find excellent material in this vast collection of letters exchanged between Huygens and the principal physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians of his time, to which are added many short papers, reprinted from the Journal des Savants and the Phil. Trans. But, on the other hand, the task of the historian would have been materially lightened if he had been spared the trouble of wading through a great many uninteresting, more or less private, letters, which help to swell these bulky volumes, but which might very well have been omitted. This is particularly the case with the letters written to Lodewijk Huygens, for though they bear witness to the brotherly affection of the writer, and are often of interest as throwing light on the state of the Netherlands in the days of William III., particularly in the year 1672, when the armies of Louis XIV. overran the country, and the last days of the Republic seemed to have come, still most of these letters are rather out of place among the scientific ones, and would have been better published separately. But hero-worship is unfortunately a disease which it is extremely difficult to resist, and we can well understand that the Dutch Society of Science has wished to do honour to their great countryman by giving as complete a picture of him as possible, both as a private man and as a philosopher.

Œuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens publiées par la Société Hollandaise des Sciences. Tome Septième. Correspondence 1670–1675.

Pp. 624. 4to. (La Haye, 1897.)