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[[underlined]] Historical Association Items (continued) [[/underlined]]

--A manuscript page of Charles Darwin's [[underlined]] The Origin of Species [[/underlined]];

--Holograph letter form Sir Humphrey Davy referring to his discovery of the alkali metals in 1808;

--A collection of more than 200 works relating to the scientific and technological interests of Leonardo da Vinci;

--One of the dozen surviving copies of Pliny's [[underlined]] Historia Naturalis [[/underlined]] (1469);

--Copies of the rare [[underlined]] De Motu Cordis [[/underlined]] of William Harvey (1628);

--Francis Bacon's [[underlined]] Instauratio Magna [[/underlined]] (1620);

--Sir William Gilbert's [[underlined]] De Magnete [[/underlined]] (1600);

--[[underlined]] De Revolutionibus [[/underlined]] by Nicolaus Copernicus (the copy personally owned by De Rheticus).

The manuscript holdings alone number nearly 4,000 items, including works of scientists from the 1400s to the early 1900s.

[[underlined]] Portraits and Iconography [[/underlined]]

A feature of the gift is a remarkable number of outstanding portraits and busts, such as ranging form a portrait in oils of Galileo Galilei (presumed to have been painted from life in 1641), portraits of Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Goodyear, Robert Stephenson, Michael Faraday, John Ericsson, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Lee de Forest, among others, and a rare bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin, sculpted by Houdon in 1778, when Franklin was Ambassador to France.