Jean-Baptiste Robinet - De la Nature - 1763/1766

De La Nature, volumes 2,3 and 4 (missing volume 1) by Jean-Baptiste Robinet.

Amsterdam, chez E. van Harrevelt 1763/1766

Full leather period bindings, sturdy with defects from use.

Title page dirty in the margins, quite clean inside, good copies of this amazing book by one of Darwin’s forerunners.

Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet, born on 23 June 17351 in Rennes where he died on 24 March 1820, was a French naturalist philosopher, known for having been one of the forerunners of the theory of evolution and someone who continued Diderot’s Encyclopedia.
In his book, De La Nature, published in 1761, Robinet formulates the idea that living organisms transform themselves in a way that forms an uninterrupted chain, an idea that would be developed in his Considérations philosophiques de la gradation des formes de l’être, ou les essais de la nature qui apprend à faire l’homme et dans son Parallèle de la condition et des facultés de l’homme avec la condition et les facultés des autres animaux, published in 1768 and 1769.
Robinet is, nevertheless, only one of the many precursors of the transformist theory that would be crystallized with the work of Darwin. It, however, remains imbued with a finalist theologicalism, using the ladder of beings to assert the superiority of the white race over the rest of the human species. (Wikipedia).