Cours de philosophie positive.

Notes

First edition of Comte's most important work, the canonical statement of positivism. It is in the prodigious Cours that he lays the foundations of his system, establishing, under the conception of the Law of the Three States, the new sociology in its historical and formal relations to the other sciences. "The remarkable achievement of Comte, all arguments about the validity of his theories aside, is the construction of a system which embraces all human activity and knowledge... it is still one of the major documents of secular philosophy" (PMM).
From the library of Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777-1850), French zoologist and anatomist, member of the French Académie des Sciences, and from 1830 successor to Lamarck in the chair of natural history at the museum (a note on the front free endpaper of volume I states: "Notes manuscrites de Ducrotay de Blainville"); extensively annotated throughout with pencilled marginalia and ink annotations to paper slips tipped in at various intervals. Some annotations were clearly slightly trimmed upon binding, the notes presumably having been made when the work was still in the original wrappers or boards. There is an extended piece on de Blainville in David M. Damkaer's The Copepodologist's Cabinet: A Biographical and Bibliographical History, American Philosophical Society 2002, pp. 241-49), where his work on lernaeids (a type of copepod or small crustacean) is highlighted: "The 1820s yielded one major effort on the peculiar parasitic forms of copepods. This was de Blainville's memoir on lernaeids, the first monograph to review and revise a single, extensive copepod group. De Blainville came the closest yet to recognising these forms as crustaceans".
One of the major philosophical texts of the nineteenth century carrying detailed annotations by a leading contemporary French zoologist.