Pantometria — A Geometrical Treatize of Measuring

Calling to memory, Right Honorable and my singular good Lord, the great favor your Lordship showed my Father in his lifetime, and the conversation it pleased your honor to have with him touching the mathematical sciences, especially in geometrical measurement, I have also lately perused certain volumes that he had compiled in the English tongue during his youth long ago. Among others, I found this "Geometrical Practice," which my Father (had God spared his life) intended to have presented to your Honor. But untimely death preventing his determination, I thought it my part to accomplish the same, as well for the satisfaction of his desire as to show myself not unmindful of the many good turns that your honor has most abundantly bestowed on me from time to time.

Having therefore supplied such parts of this treatise as were obscure or imperfect, and adjoining thereunto a geometrical discourse of the five regular or Platonic bodies—containing sundry theoretical and practical propositions of the manifold proportions arising by the mutual comparison of these solids, their inscription, circumscription, or transformation—and now finally having fully finished the same, I am bold to exhibit and dedicate it to your Honor as an eternal memorial of your Lordship’s great favor toward the furtherance of learning, and a public testimony of my bounden duty. I hope your Honor will rather respect the goodwill with which it is presented than the worthiness of the present itself, which is not equal to the excellent knowledge your Lordship is endowed with, even in the very fountains themselves from whence these conclusions, as springs or branches, are derived.

Yet, it is such that I have no doubt your Honor will both accept it in good part and also, at leisure from affairs of more importance, delight yourself with it—the rather because it contains sundry such newly invented theorems and other strange conclusions as no geometers have hitherto published in any language. Whereby your Lordship shall not only encourage me hereafter to attempt greater matters but also, as it were with a sovereign medicine, prevent the poisoned infection of envious, backbiting tongues. For as the truth of these experiments and rules shall never be impugned, being so firmly grounded, guarded, and defended with geometrical demonstration—against whose power no subtle sophistry or craftily colored arguments can prevail—so I think there is none so impudently malicious as will or dare reprove them for vain or unprofitable. When they shall perceive that your Lordship (whose learned judgment, gravity, and wisdom is sufficiently known to the world) does allow and accept them as fragrant flowers, selected and gathered out of the pleasant mathematical gardens, meet to delight any noble, free, or well-disposed mind, and as profitable fruits serving most commodiously for sundry necessary uses in the commonwealth.

Those who shall thereby receive pleasure or commodity must of duty yield worthy thanks to your Lordship, under whose protection and patronage I have not feared to send abroad (as a wandering pilgrim) this orphan and fatherless child. As I perceive it favorably accepted by your Honor, so I mean—God sparing my life—to employ no small portion of this my short and transitory time in flourishing our native tongue with mathematical demonstrations and some such other rare experiments and practical conclusions as no foreign realm has hitherto, I suppose, been a partaker of. In the meantime, I cease to detain your Honor any longer with my rude and homely tale from more serious and weighty affairs, committing your Lordship to the tuition of the Almighty, who grant you a long, healthful, honorable life, accompanied with perfect felicity.