Arca mosis sive historia mundi.Leiden & Rotterdam, ex officina Hackiana, 1668. 12mo. With an engraved frontispiece (dated 1669), a woodcut printer's device and some initials. Contemporary sheepskin.

[36], 220, [2] pp.Original and only edition of this curious work which can be considered as a partly historical, and partly scientific ‘history of the world’, including all kinds of arguments concerning chemistry, physics, anatomy and even alchemy. Hornius felt the need for philological criticism to back up what he saw to be ‘integral history’, and was fully involved both in Reformation’s attack on Scholasticism and in the rebirth of literature and the emergence of philology. ‘I have not come across any book more curious, less known and scarcer … the Arca Mosis is one of the most original books which I have ever met with’ (Ferguson, Bibl. notes on histories of inventions and books of secrets).Hornius, following a third road between Aristotelism and mechanism as represented by Comenius c.s., treated universal history in a modern manner, no longer divided into the history of the four classical empires (Assyria, Persia, Macedon, Rome) but based on the concept of national history, including the history of the peoples of the New World (De originibus Americanis). He was also one of the earliest historiographers to divide world history into three major epochs, antiquity from earliest times until the Migration period, the middle period from the Migration period to the year 1500, and modern history from 1500 to his own day. Head of the spine a little loose, boards a bit shaved, otherwise in good condition.l ADB, 13, pp. 137-138; Ferguson, I, 417; Ferguson, Bibl. Notes on histories of inventions and books of secrets, II, Suppl. 3, pp. 49-50 (nrs. 79-80); Graesse, III, col. 371; NNBW, VIII, cols. 848-849; not in Hoogendoorn.