The Life of Sir William Crookes

First edition, first impression.  414pp, with portrait plate frontispiece.  Red cloth-covered boards with gilt titles on the spine.   8vo.  Cloth is a little worn, gently rubbed and rounded at corners, joints and spine ends, a few minor indentations on edges, slightly sunned over spine.  Previous owner's name neatly inked on front free endpaper.  Some toning and spotting on first and last few leaves, and in margins throughout.  In its original heavily toned and brittle dust wrapper, rubbed and bumped at edges, price clipped, shelf worn.

Crookes (1832-1919) was a scientist who worked in the field of spectroscopy; he was a pioneer of vacuum tubes and the inventor, in 1875, of the Crookes tube - an experimental discharge tube in which cathode rays and streams of electrons were discovered, and the discoverer of thallium.