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8 o. 4 photographic plates, text illustrations. Original dark blue cloth, gilt-lettered spine (very minor wear). Provenance : the author's copy with his signature, ink and pencil manuscript additions to the tables on pp. 89 and 143, 2 loosely inserted type-written sheets for a series of lectures by Aston) -- Franz Sondheimer, chemist and bibliophile (bookplate) -- Haskell F. Norman (bookplate, sale Christie's New York, 29 October 1988, lot 903). THE AUTHOR'S ANNOTATED COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION. Aston began researching the different atomic weights of two forms of neon at Cambridge in 1913, under the guidance of J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron). He left to fight in the First World War, but later continued, replacing Thomson's parabola apparatus with the mass spectrograph that he invented. This enabled him to discover that elements are composed of atoms of varying mass, and that the atomic weight of an element is the average of the atoms comprising it. Aston first used the word "isotopes" to describe atoms of differing weights within the same element. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1922 for his discovery, by means of the mass spectrograph, of the isotopes of a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his discovery of the "whole number rule" (1919). Norman 77; PMM 412. James, Nobel Laureates in Chemistry (1993) 140-45.