The essays or counsels, civil and moral, of Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St Alban. With a table of the colours of good & evil. Whereunto is added the wisdom of the antients. Enlarged by the honourable author himself; and now more exactly published

London: Printed by M. Clark, for Samuel Mearne, in Little Britain, John Martyn, in St. Pauls Church-yard, and Henry Herringman, in the New Exchange, 1680. Twelfth edition. Octavo;A6, B-Z8, Aa-Bb8, Cc3, [Cc4]; lacks the final blank leaf. This copy is bound in original boards, recently rebacked. [Bacon's] Essays, the fruits of his political and social observations, were first published in 1597, enlarged in 1612, and again in 1625. His long attempt to reform the intellectual habits of the European mind began with the publication of The Advancement of Learning in 1605, which attacked the unprofitable scholasticism that inhibited the growth of knowledge and the mental prejudices that helped to keep men in ignorance. Above all he deplored the poor and confused state of knowledge about the operations of the natural world. Novum Organum, begun about 1608, published 1620, called for a systematic study of the natural world and of the causes of things, and proposed the inductive method as the most reliable instruments of enquiry. Bacon worked out the principles of the experimental method in this book, and developed them in De Augmentis, 1623. Sylva Sylvarum, a proposal of 1,000 experiments to be undertaken, was published posthumously in 1627, together with New Atlantis, a Utopian fragment written about 1617 that urged the foundation of a college for scientific research. A short book that enjoyed much popularity in his lifetime was De Sapientia Veterum, 1609 (translated as The Wisdom of the Ancients, 1619), which tried to demonstrate that the myths of the Greeks were coded accounts of their knowledge of the physical world." (Quoted from The Seventeenth Century, by Graham Perry, pages 264-265.).