by the easiness of the successive steps into the belief that anyone could have discovered them for himself. On the contrary, the studied simplicity and the perfect finish of the treatises involve at the same time an element of mystery. Though each step depends upon the preceding ones, we are left in the dark as to how they were suggested to Archimedes. There is, in fact, much truth in a remark of Wallis to the effect that he seems "as it were of set purpose to have covered up the traces of his investigation as if he had grudged posterity the secret of his method of inquiry while he wished to extort from them assent to his results." Wallis adds with equal reason that not only Archimedes but nearly all the ancients so hid away from posterity their method of Analysis (though it is certain that they had one) that more modern mathematicians found it easier to invent a new Analysis than to seek out the old. This is no doubt the reason why Archimedes and other Greek geometers have received so little attention during the present century and why Archimedes is for the most part only vaguely remembered as the inventor of a screw, while even mathematicians scarcely know him except as the discoverer of the principle in hydrostatics which bears his name. It is only of recent years that we have had a satisfactory edition of the Greek text, that of Heiberg brought out in 1880-1, and I know of no complete translation since the German one of Nizze, published in 1824, which is now out of print and so rare that I had some difficulty in procuring a copy.
The plan of this work is then the same as that which I followed in editing the Conics of Apollonius. In this case, however, there has been less need as well as less opportunity for compression, and it has been possible to retain the numbering of the propositions and to enunciate them in a manner more nearly approaching the original without thereby making the enunciations obscure. Moreover, the subject matter is not so complicated as to necessitate absolute uniformity in the notation used (which is the only means whereby Apollonius can be made
