Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

The war on the weevil 

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CORTI, Bonaventura. STORIA NATURALE di quegli insetti che rodono le piantine del frumento in erba nelle nostre campagne. Coi mezze facili e sicuri per distruggerli. Tessuta dall’Abbate Bonaventura Corti Socio di varie Accademie E da Lui esibita agli Amatori dell’Agricoltura. In Modena: Presso la Società Tipografica, 1804.  SOLD

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FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. 51, [1]; with one folding plate at end; later ink mark on final leaf, but otherwise clean and fresh; in contemporary mottled sheep, boards with decorative gilt borders, block-printed endpapers; early shelf-label (illegible) at foot of spine, and very light rubbing to lower cover, but a lovely copy.

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First edition of this comprehensive guide to the nature, life-cycle, and eradication of the wheat weevil, by the Jesuit physicist and botanist Bonaventura Corti (1729-1813).

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Corti was professor of metaphysics and geometry at Reggio, and subsequently prefect of the botanic gardens at Modena; his published work covers a number of scientific fields, but his most important work was in plant biology, where he identified, in his Osservazioni microscopiche sulla Tremella e sulla circolazione del fluido in una pianta acquajuola (1774), the rotational movement of protoplasm within plant cells. In the present work, however, he turns his attention to more immediate concerns, as explained in the extract from his correspondence with Bonnet with which the volume opens. Bonnet writes: ‘I was eager to express my deepest satisfaction at your decision to suspend, for the time being, your brilliant research, and to devote yourself solely to those studies which, though less splendid, are nonetheless of far-reaching and immediate benefit. What you have done to rid your districts of the scourge of the worms that devour food crops is truly a work born of true love of patria, and rightly deserves the gratitute of your fellow citizens’. Corti describes the course of his observations of the life cycle of the wheat weevil, discusses its anatomy and habits, and finally proposes three methods of eliminating them, advising farmers, among other things, not to leave the windows open at night lest moths fly in and lay eggs in grains of wheat, and to dissuade weevils with strongly smelling herbs, or rotting shrimp. The folding plate at the end depicts the weevil throughout its life. 

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OCLC records two locations outside Italy, at Oklahoma and the Musée nationale d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, with SBN (IT\ICCU\TO0E\147040) finding six copies in Italian libraries. 

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