Sapporo Agricultural College and Its Collection of Foreign Books on Physics

Abstract

Sapporo Agricultural College (1876-1907), established by the Kaitakushi Branch of the Meiji Government and directed, in s early stage, by W. S Clark, the President of Massachusetts Agricultural College, had built a unique collection of foreign books of physics, significant not only in quantity but also in quality, through the Yedo and Meiji eras of Japan. A thorough investigation of the conserved books (113 copies) and a time-sequential analysis of introduction of them to the College library resulted in the following observations, where the year of publication and that of introduction were assumed to coincide and the whole sequence (1850-1907) were divided into each interval of five years; 1) As for the regional distribution of the original publication, three peaks are remarkable, the first at 1875 features American natural philosophy text books, the second at 1885 English natural philosophy ones and the third at 1895 German lecture series of physics, respectively. 2) More individually, the first peak is represented by Quackenbos * Natural Philosophy (1873), the second by Stewart's Lessons in Elementary Physics and the third by Violle's Lehrbuch der Physik (1892, tr.by Gumlich) as well as other German lecture series. Besides them, noticeable is the repeated introduction of Ganot's Elementary Treatise on Physics (tr. by Atkinson) over the whole period, particularly in 1890's.