Physiologia Kircheriana experimentalis: general information of the treatise and the fate of a copy from the collections of Sakhalin regional universal scientific library

Abstract

The article is dedicated to natural philosophy work “Kircher’s Experimental Physiology” and divided into two parts. In the first part we give a general representation of the contents of the book, which is closely related to the history of its creation. Published fifteen years earlier, “Subterranean World” by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher received a controversial reception from the contemporaries: both among forerunners of modern scientific thought, who criticized Kircher for his theory of panspermia, and even more so among researchers, who believed in the possibility of transmuting metals through alchemy, which reality Kircher rejected. In response to this criticism, his disciple Johann Stephan Kestler compiled in 1675 a compendium of his master’s previously published texts, accompanied by his own comments, which was published five years later. The second part of the article is dedicated to a copy of the book stored in the collection of the Sakhalin Regional Universal Scientific Library. Established as a book monument in 2020, it entered the library in 1972 from the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR (current Russian State Library) collection; however, we have only indirect and fragmentary evidences of its previous history and its further specialized study, as it seems to us, is of significant scientific interest what we are trying to actualize in the text.