Collation: 4to: A⁴ *A² B–2T⁴, 170 leaves, pp. [12] 327 [1] (last page blank), 6 line errata slip pasted to p. 327. Title printed in red and black, wood- or metalcut decorations and initials.
Plates: 18 engraved Plates: numbered 1–18 (bound at the end, the last double page).
Condition: 289 x 229mm. Worming in lower margins of text leaves, otherwise a fine fresh copy.
Binding: Contemporary calf, gilt filet and blind ruled borders, gilt spine, red morocco lettering piece, marbled endpapers, red sprinkled edges. Spine slilghtly rubbed and with a small chip in the headband.
Provenance: Earls of Portsmouth with engraved bookplate of the second Earl (succeeded 1762), Franks F.30719.
References: ESTC t96634 and n65572; Goldsmiths’-Kress 6495; Wellcome II, p. 52.
Price: £600

¶ First edition, though the tables themselves were first published in 1707.
A very nice copy of a standard work on Greek, Roman, Jewish and Arabic coins, weights and measures and commerce, including the prices of goods and services and rates of pay. There is also a dissertation on ‘the Navigation of the Ancients’, and an important final section on ancient medicine. This includes the doses given by ancient physicians, and the prescriptions and practice of Celsus, Scribonius Largus, Marcellus, Ruffus Ephesius, Paulus Aegineta and Areteus.
Arbuthnot took his MD at St Andrew’s in 1796; he was elected FRS in 1704 and admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1710. A friend of Swift, who called him the ‘queen’s favourite physician’ he was close to the leading statesmen of the Harley administration and was the author of the Art of Political Lying ‘one of the best specimens of the ironical wit of the time’ (DNB). He published the first work in English on probability, Of the laws of chance (1692), a translation and expansion of Huygens’ work.
    With a dedicatory poem to the King by the author’s son Charles, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, for whose benefit the work was published.