The Works of Euclid, Vol. 3

PREFACE.

Proposition II of Book II was most corrupt in three manuscripts, in the editions of Basel and Oxford, as well as in the versions of Zamberti and Commandino. I have restored this demonstration in its entirety.

The reading on page 516 is mine. The manuscripts and the Basel edition and the versions of Zamberti and Commandino were entirely unintelligible, and Gregory's emendation did not seem successful to me.

The variant reading of the first line of page 531 is especially to be noted. This was τῆς AB for τῆς; while this error remains, what Hypsicles says is impossible; and yet this error is present in three manuscripts, in the editions of Basel and Oxford, and in the versions of Zamberti and Commandino.

Since my Euclid is finished, without any delay I shall submit to the press the works of Apollonius together with the Lemmas of Pappus and the Commentaries of Eutocius, as well as the two books of Serenus on the Cylinder and the Cone. (See the preface of the second volume.)

This third and final volume of Euclid would have been published in the month of October most recently passed, had the miserable fate of my firstborn daughter not brought delay; after she had been the sweet solace of my life for twenty-eight years, she died prematurely in my arms on the nineteenth day of September. Alas! She could not—I almost said, she would not—survive her daughter, who was snatched away in the very lap of her mother on the twelfth day of the same month, not yet having completed the third year of her age.

Worn out by all these hardships, and not thinking that I could survive such dire and sudden disasters, I had besought the most illustrious man Delambre, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, to be willing to attend to the completion of the printing of my work if any misfortune should befall me. Thus, with the assistance of M. Delambre, not even my own death would have brought any delay to the full publication of the works of Euclid; and they would have been published long ago, had there not existed calumnies and vexations, always being reborn, to which I have been subjected for sixteen years and more.