The entire block of text is enclosed within a highly ornate woodcut border featuring repeating patterns of stylized foliate scrolls, floral motifs, and decorative arabesques.

PREFACE.

...fall under the power of our eyes, because the height of such difficult matters obscures the light of our minds, just as the splendor of the bright Sun dazzles the eyes of bats original: "Chauue-souris" that dwell in darkness. But if something is confirmed with reason by Mathematicians in Geometry or in Arithmetic, we estimate it to be as certain as if it were spoken by the oracle of Apollo.

From this, one sees that as the mathematical sciences are of very great importance—both for administering public and private affairs and for perfecting our minds—one cannot imagine anything more honorable, nor more useful, nor more necessary to the human race than the mathematical disciplines. While other sciences discovered their use through a long succession of time after the creation of the world, this mechanical art In the Renaissance, the "mechanical arts" referred to practical skills like architecture, navigation, and agriculture, often contrasted with the "liberal arts." was so necessary to men even from the very beginning of the world that if it had been taken away, it would have seemed as if the light of the sun had been extinguished from the world.

And to begin with Adam, the first father of the human race: all the means and industry From the French "industrie," meaning skill, ingenuity, or cleverness rather than modern manufacturing. which he used to protect his life from earthly necessities—by building small houses covered with straw and raising little roofs to defend himself from the inclemency of the heavens, the intemperature of the air, the injuries of the weather, and many inconveniences of the earth; or in covering his body with various and humble garments to ward off the rains and avoid the great force of the winds, the burning heat of the Sun, and the bitterness of the cold—all of this proceeded from the mechanical art.

To this art, that which usually happens to the winds does not occur. The winds, coming with very great vehemence from the deep centers where they are born, and with their furious force splitting mountains, opening the earth, breaking thick walls, toppling high towers, and submerging great ships in the vast sea, bit by bit they become weakened and faint, losing their course and then vanishing. Instead, [the mechanical art] follows the habit of great rivers, which, being small at their source and growing continually by many...