Item #12678 Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of Agriculture. Sir Humphry Davy, Sylvester Graham.
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of Agriculture.
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of Agriculture.
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of Agriculture.

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of Agriculture.

Hartford, CT: Hudson, 1819. Second American edition. Hardcover. This volume is the personal annotated copy of the leading vegetarian diet reformer of his day, the very popular Sylvester Graham (1795-1851), who also advocated temperance, sexual restraint, and the interconnection of diet, health, and morality. He believed in the superiority of whole grain breads and eschewed highly processed foods; the Graham cracker is named for him.

Graham’s followers (Grahamites) set up boardinghouses across the country for adherents' use, established health food stores, published widely, and set up physiological societies in cities and on college campuses. Graham's principles had widespread impact on contemporary theories on health, such as water based cures and phrenology, and on movements such as Christian Science and Seventh Day Adventism. Most of the annotations in this volume have to do with the appropriate conditions for plant health. And Graham notes Davy's take on gluten, writing in the margin "gluten, the most nutritive" ((p7).

Sir Humphry Davy (1778 - 1829) was a pioneer of the use of chemistry in agriculture, and was the inventor of the field of electrochemistry. He was a leading British scientist who discovered several alkali and alkaline earth metals, and invented the Davy lamp, which protected miners from triggering methane explosions in the mines.

8vo, viii, 304 pp, appendix, index. In the original gray boards with no title at front cover or spine. Uncut in original boards, paper spine wearing thin with loss, first 7 pages loose, otherwise a very bright, clean copy. Damp on spine and boards, only on endpapers. Item #12678

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