Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/24

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

the face of such an announcement, suppose that this work afterwards underwent augmentation? If not, we have such presumption of the doctrine in question being in agitation, as it might be difficult to find elsewhere. But this presumption is destroyed by the work on arithmetic, which though certainly unfinished, is terminated by the announcement, that it was finished "at the eighteenth hour of the Sabbath, July 24, when the viceroy Jo. Cerda was expected at Messina, cum multo pontis et arcus apparatu, indiction xv, 1557."

These four books, taken down for a first chance merely to make an opening, have caused great inroad on our space. We shall take a few other illustrations. Publication is now commonly counfounded with printing, though history swarms with instances in which the first was long prior to the second. There are those who would contend for the equivalence of the two words; but perhaps there is no instance more to the point, in proof of the general aptitude to distinguish between the two, than the case of the Academy of Sciences. This body did not begin to print its periodical volumes of transactions, in the manner done by the Royal Society from 1665, until after the renouvellement in 1699. It was not until 1729-1733 that the Academy published the collection in eleven volumes (fourteen parts) containing the memoirs from 1666 to 1699, which is now considered as a commencing part of the series. Nevertheless, no one ever referred to the memoirs therein contained, as published at any other date than that at which the subsequent printed volumes showed them to have been communicated to the Academy. The real earlier publications made at the instance of the Academy are the 'Mémoires de Mathématique et de Physique,' in two parts, Paris, 1692, 1693, folio; the 'Divers Ouvrages de Mathématique et de Physique,' Paris 1693, folio; and [14] the 'Regiae Scientiarum Acad-

14