Oculus humanus artificaliter constructus oder Strucur des menschlichen Auges nach Kunst verfertiget, bestehende aus Helffen-Bein, Horn, Christall und Glaß, woran alle Theile deß menschlichen Auges gantz deutlich können dargethan sampt denen musculis tunicis & humoribus, so alle Stück vor Stück anatomice zu leget u. betrachtet werden.
Frankfurt: Jacob Andreae [for the author], 1709.
Price: $5,500.00
Octavo: 15.5 x 9.4 cm. 39 pp. Collation: A-B8, C4. With three added engraved plates on two sheets.
FIRST EDITION.
Bound in later speckled calf (short worm-trail at the foot of the upper board.) A fine copy. Very rare. No copies in North America. Later reprinted under the title "Anatomia oculi humani"(1730 and 1747). Only the 1730 ed. is held in North America (at NLM).
A detailed description -with accompanying illustrations- of an artificial eye made of ivory, horn, crystal, and glass, “on which all the parts of the human eye, including the muscles and tissues, can be clearly shown.” The author, the court mathematician, optician, and instrument maker Heinrich Ludwig Muth (1673-1754), also describes another twenty-two inventions, including several types of microscopes, a cryptography machine, a telescope, a pantograph, a magnetic dial, a barometer, and such optical delights as a lantern that casts an image of a clock upon a wall, “so that the hours are indicated precisely with fiery numbers and fiery hands”, magic lanterns, and a camera obscura.
Muth tells us that the artificial eye was invented by the renowned Nuremberg ivory-turner Stephan Zick (1639-1715), who publicly presented the invention at Nuremberg in 1700. When news of the invention spread, Muth was asked by various people to replicate it. Having succeeded, he published this description along with the catalogue of his other inventions.
Both the image of the eye and the descriptive text were first printed in “Kurtze und Mechanische Beschreibung Dieses Kunst-Auges”(Nuremberg: ca. 1700). The text, probably written by Zick, draws on the work of the physician Daniel Bscherer (1656–1718) and the anatomist Johann Georg Volkamer (1662–1744).
A surviving example of the eye (though made of less costly materials than those used by Zick and Muth) is held by the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.
Poggendorff II, 248