TO THE READER.

of which only one or two fragments have been described, as if to whet the appetite. From it, Isaac Vossius had transcribed twenty-six verses of Alexander the Aetolian (or rather the Ephesian), which Gale Thomas Gale, English classical scholar first published, and many have published after him. Bullialdus, however, publishing the arithmetic part of Theon of Smyrna's work for the first time in 1644, said this regarding the Milanese codex of the astronomical part: "If we can ever obtain it, we shall ensure it is made public property."

And he himself, in that same book, published a document he had discovered in a certain codex of Cleomedes' Meteorics, taken from Theon of Smyrna's Astronomy, consisting of three lines regarding the fictitious motion of the sun toward one degree in the latitude of the zodiac: the origin of which error is traced back as far as Eudoxus, and traces of which are found even in Pliny and Martianus Capella. In the year 1645, in his Prolegomena to Philolaic Astronomy, Bullialdus says: "Theon of Smyrna, in his Astronomy, which we had from the library of the most illustrious and most reverend Archbishop of Toulouse, Charles de Montchal, reports the same things about Eudoxus and Callippus as Simplicius does from the history of astronomy by Eudemus."