PREFACE.

The Conics geometric treatise on conic sections of Apollonius of Perga, which are praised by the unanimous and well-deserved consent of mathematicians, have found no editor since Halley. And perhaps, for mathematicians who look only at the subject matter, existing interpretations are sufficiently adequate. But, not to speak of those who are interested in knowing what words Apollonius himself used, and by what reasoning he could have equated the formulas and signs of our modern mathematicians, it is necessary that a certain foundation at long last be laid for those very interpretations. This is something that Halley, who until now is the only one to have edited the Conics in Greek, neither wanted to do nor could do, given the state of critical scholarship in those times.

Therefore, I have decided to prepare a new edition of the Conics by examining and collating the Greek manuscripts, especially since I saw that Halley's edition is so rare that it could hardly be obtained even at an exorbitant price. But from the beginning, it was clear to me that I should only treat those books that exist in Greek. For although it did not escape my notice that the edition would thus be incomplete and, so to speak, truncated, I could not bring myself to repeat the translation of books V–VII, which Halley had made from the Arabic, without the support of any critical resources. And because of my ignorance of that language, I could not approach the Arabic manuscripts myself. Let the work, therefore, remain incomplete, until someone of the Arabic language...