EPISTLE TO THE SENATE OF NUREMBERG

and because you are the ones who deserve this praise primarily, being the first and almost the only ones today in Germany (let there be no envy in this statement) by whose patronage the cause of proper studies is sustained and fostered. I wish others—of whom Germany has many Princes, otherwise illustrious for titles of not dishonorable things—would also follow this example. Certainly, they cannot rightly hope for their noble deeds to be extended to posterity with praise without the aid of the most excellent literature. For we have discovered by experience that no one can acquire a name for himself, nor will he have any place of praise among posterity, who has not studied with good faith to strengthen his mind with these disciplines. Wherefore, those who despise the arts, besides passing their lives ingloriously, are also convicted of being ungrateful to the very Creator of things. For all honorable arts were brought to men not without the certain dispensation of the highest divinity, so that a person who is a contemner of those goods, without which even a human being cannot properly flourish, should no longer be considered worthy of life. The more the mind is superior to the body, the more carefully it should be tended with diligent study. It is tended, however, most of all by right reason and virtue, with which all honorable arts simultaneously have a certain kinship. For, to pass over others, what utilities has Geometry—which is called by the Greek name for the measurement of the earth—not brought to us in life? What have the students of this discipline left untried for the preservation of human life? What have they not dared to bring to light? Are those engines of war not their inventions, the battering rams, the weapons, and the fortifications, and everywhere all other things which the Christian faith acknowledges that God himself created in number, weight, and measure? Have the geometers not brought the orders, intervals, and magnitudes of the celestial bodies to our knowledge? Archimedes the Sicilian wrote many pleasant, useful, and necessary things for life regarding these matters; among which are two books On the Sphere and Cylinder, written most copiously and happily. Regarding the Measurement of the Circle, the ancients have handed down nothing equally learned as what one can read in this our author. For if the circle in geometric figures is an infinite line in which there is no term from which, as they call it, nor a term to which—namely, whose beginning and end are at any given point—who, I ask, of the ancients wrote or taught more clearly than our Archimedes? Who has ever more clearly placed before human eyes those four terms upon which all Mathematics consists: the point, the line, the plane, and the depth? And regarding plane bodies and solids, as well as round and conical ones, and those which rise in the manner of pyramids; also regarding the line, the surface, and the body, by which three things all magnitude is contained; and because every body consists of three intervals—length, breadth, and thickness; finally, regarding the square figure, which in architecture claims the first place and one rightfully belonging to it, to which it is almost proper that it is...