RAUCH (François Antoine). - Lot 84

RAUCH (François Antoine). Harmonie hydro-végétale et météorologique, ou recherches Sur les moyens de recréer avec nos forêts la force des températures et la régularité des saisons, par des plantations. Paris : Les frères Levrault, An x de la République [1802]. - 2 volumes in one in-8, 205 x 125: frontispiece, (2 ff.), 8, 375 pp. ; frontispiece, (2 ff.), 299 pp. Original edition, dedicated to the First Consul, of this major work in the history of ecology in France, written by the Ponts-et-Chaussées engineer François Antoine Rauch (1762-1837), recognized as the founding father of French ecological thinking. This work, meditated for the happiness of the countryside, embraces the correlations existing between mountains, forests and meteors; temperatures and seasons; the regeneration of springs, the repopulation of streams and rivers; the sanitation and cultivation of marshes; the fructification of great roads and pastoral ways; with some moral views on the honors to be paid in our funeral ceremonies to human nature" (title). In his epistle, the author appeals to the First Consul and makes the following observation: "The arts, sciences and invigorating commerce are coming alive with new life; but the great, imposing nature, this nurturing mother of all beings, is sagging from a thousand centuries of mutilation and outrages. Our beautiful mountains have been stripped of the shining garments of the majestic forests that once covered them with their protective, silent shadows; the meteors, unleashed, now only announce themselves with devastation and sinister hissing sounds; with the departure of our ancient forests have vanished those many children of nature, whose flight has tarnished the primitive radiance of creation; the Naiads of our fathers are dried up; the streams flow only languidly; the rivers are, in their sad nakedness, accompanied by withering marshy swaddling clothes; the urns of our old rivers no longer pour their beautiful waters except intermittently, and our nautical canals, threatened with extinction, are forced to take away the waters necessary for our crops; winds, once unknown, to which the deforestation of our mountains has given a modern existence, are now ravaging the richest basins of the republic; the increasing inclemency of temperatures and seasons is everywhere halting nature's liberal will; the earth loses one more element of its fertility every day; from its bosom, denatured by our continual outrages, come out the cohorts of diseases that come to wither the shining dream of life... " This visionary text is illustrated, in the present edition, with two frontispieces engraved by Tardieu and Dupréel after a drawing by C. Monnet. The first "represents the physicist showing, to the First Consul, our mountains crowned with cedars, pines, larches, firs, intermingled with our forest trees, reviving an extinct waterfall; sheltered fields and a landscape such as all points of France could, by well-directed work, present the sweet image of it" (p. vij). The second frontispiece is captioned: "Elisée. Solemnité des Tombeaux." These two engravings were not included in the second edition of 1818. Good copy in later boards, well preserved despite a few traces of light dampening, not serious.