The page is framed by a rich, rectangular woodcut border featuring an intricate pattern of scrolling acanthus leaves, floral vines, and repeating symmetrical motifs. Within this frame, at the start of the main text, is a decorative woodcut initial "S" set in a square block with foliate background ornamentation.

PREFACE.

OF THE EXCELLENCE OF MATHEMATICS, WHERE IT IS DEMONSTRATED HOW MUCH THEY

are necessary for the acquisition of all the liberal Arts.

IF the traveler, in passing through the pleasant meadows, is accustomed to remain in doubt from the immense beauty of the colored flowers as to which of all the others is the most noble and the most excellent, it is no wonder if the high Philosophers, strolling through the cultivated gardens of the divine sciences and seeing them all directed to this unique end and principal scope, to investigate truth fully and discover it to the world, felt variously about which of them they should give the first place. Nevertheless, in the end, the excellence, or rather the divine treasure of the Mathematical disciplines, guided by their clear judgment, was preferred to all other human sciences. Because these not only claim for themselves, by their natural and proper gift, what they wish; but, bringing, like the shining Sun to the whole earth, the most serene light to all others, they make the knowledge and understanding of them easier for us. Since natural things are in themselves so obscure and rough that that intellect is indeed very happy and rare which, after long study, can clearly judge them. And hence was born the variety of opinions and the great contention among the Philosophers concerning the principles of natural things (from which, as from an inexhaustible fountain, flows everything that is scattered under the rich Heaven upon the whole earth), so that barely three or four of them agreed on such a matter. The same also happens with the first philosophy, whose supereminence extends only to the contemplation of God the Best and Greatest, and to the investigation of those divine Minds which assist continuously at His most holy eternal Majesty. This, however, she cannot do, nor operate simply with irrefutable argument, without the sight of those things which fall under the power of our eyes. Because the height of things so arduous clouds the light of our souls, no less than the splendor of the luminous Sun dazzles the