Variarum Observationum Liber. [Bound with:] Observationum ad Pomp. Melam Appendix. Accedit ejusdem ad Tertias P, Simonii Objectiones Responsio. Subjungitur Pauli Colomesii ad Henricum Justellum Epistola.

Notes

The first editions of these late works by the Dutch scholar then resident in London, Isaac Vossius (1618-1689), both collections of wide-ranging scholarship and speculation mainly concerning the ancient world. (A contemporary joke, attributed to Charles II, is that Vossius would believe anything not in the Bible.) The 'book of various observations' considers Roman history, the geography of northern Africa and the east, the Sibylline oracles, the construction of boats, the appearance of the moon, Jewish history, and - almost in passing - the population of the world and the age and superiority of Chinese civilisation, society, and medicine. Jonathan Israel's recent biography of Spinoza highlights Vossius's Sinophilia, calling him 'the first Westerner to affirm Chinese philosophy's and medicine's general superiority, as well as Chinese civilzation's unmatched antiquity' (Spinoza Life and Legacy, p. 662) - Vossius's main contribution to the more radical end of Enlightenment thinking that Spinoza exemplifies.
Bound with it, as often, is a collection of more directly classical studies with a polemical bent, the main element an 'appendix' to Vossius's earlier edition of Pomponius Mela which in fact continues a personal feud with Gronovius (and, though he was already dead, Salmasius) carried out in the form of emendations and commentary.
Also as often, particularly when found together, both works have had their printed dedications left out when binding - these were both to Charles II, and presumably omitted as no longer necessary since the monarch had died by the time the second work had left the press.