TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION. "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good," does not mean demonstrate everything. From nothing assumed, nothing can be proved. "Geometry without axioms," was a book which went through several editions, and still has historical value. But now a volume with such a title would, without opening it, be set down as simply the work of a paradoxer. The set of axioms far the most influential in the intellectual history of the world was put together in Egypt: but really it owed nothing to the Egyptian race, drew nothing from the boasted lore of Egypt's priests. The Papyrus of the Rhind, belonging to the British Museum, but given to the world by the erudition of a German Egyptologist, Eisenlohr, and a German historian of mathematics, Cantor, gives us more knowledge of the state of mathematics in ancient Egypt than all else previously accessible to the modern world. Its whole testimony confirms with overwhelming force the position that Geometry as a science, strict and self-conscious deductive reasoning, was created by the subtle intellect of the same race whose bloom in art still overawes us in the Venus of Milo, the Apollo Belvidere, the Laocoon. In a geometry occur the most noted set of axioms, the geometry of Euclid, a pure Greek, professor at the University of Alexandria. Not only at its very birth did this typical product of the Greek genius assume sway as ruler in the pure sciences, not only does its first efflorescence carry us through the splendid days of Theon and Hypatia, but unlike the latter, fanatics can not murder it; that dismal flood, the dark ages, can not drown it. Like the phoenix of its native Egypt, it rises with the new birth of culture. An Anglo Saxon, Adelard of Bath, finds it clothed in Arabic vestments in the land of the Alhambra. Then clothed in Latin, it and the new-born printing press confer honor on each other. Finally back again in its original Greek, it is published first in queenly Venice, then in stately Oxford, since then everywhere. The latest edition in Greek is just issuing from Leipsic's learned presses. [5] How the first translation into our cut-and-thrust, survival-of-the-fittest English was made from the Greek and Latin by Henricus Billingsly, Lord Mayor of London, and published with a preface by John Dee the Magician, may be studied in the Library of our own Princeton College, where they have, by some strange chance, Billingsly's own copy of the Latin version of Commandine bound with the Editio Princeps in Greek and enriched with his autograph emendations. Even to-day in the vast system of examinations set by Cambridge, Oxford, and the British government, no proof will be accepted which infringes Euclid's order, a sequence founded upon his set of axioms. The American ideal is success. In twenty years the American maker expects to be improved upon, superseded. The Greek ideal was perfection. The Greek Epic and Lyric poets, the Greek sculptors, remain unmatched. The axioms of the Greek geometer remained unquestioned for twenty centuries. How and where doubt came to look toward them is of no ordinary interest, for this doubt was epoch-making in the history of mind. Among Euclid's axioms was one differing from the others in prolixity, whose place fluctuates in the manuscripts, and which is not used in Euclid's first twenty-seven propositions. Moreover it is only then brought in to prove the inverse of one of these already demonstrated. All this suggested, at Europe's renaissance, not a doubt of the axiom, but the possibility of getting along without it, of deducing it from the other axioms and the twenty-seven propositions already proved. Euclid demonstrates things more axiomatic by far. He proves what every dog knows, that any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third. Yet when he has perfectly proved that lines making with a transversal equal alternate angles are parallel, in order to prove the inverse, that parallels cut by a transversal make equal alternate angles, he brings in the unwieldly postulate or axiom: "If a straight line meet two straight lines, so as to make the two interior angles on the same side of it taken together less than two right angles, these straight lines, being continually produced, shall at length meet on that side on which are the angles which are less than two right angles." Do you wonder that succeeding geometers wished by demonstration to push this unwieldly thing from the set of fundamental axioms. Numerous and desperate were the attempts to deduce it from reasonings about the nature of the straight line and plane angle. In the 'Encyclopedie der Wissenschaften und Kunste; Von Ersch und Gruber;" Leipzig, 1838; under "Parallel," Sohncke says that in mathematics there is nothing over which so much has been spoken, written, and striven, as over the theory of parallels, and all, so far (up to his time), without reaching a definite result and decision. Some acknowledged defeat by taking a new definition of parallels, as for example the stupid one, "Parallel lines are everywhere equally distant," still given on page 33 of Schuyler's Geometry, which that author, like many of his unfortunate prototypes, then attempts to identify with Euclid's definition by pseudo-reasoning which tacitly assumes Euclid's postulate, e. g. he says p. 35: "For, if not parallel, they are not everywhere equally distant; and since they lie in the same plane; must approach when produced one way or the other; and since straight lines continue in the same direction, must continue to approach if produced farther, and if sufficiently produced, must meet." This is nothing but Euclid's assumption, diseased and contaminated by the introduction of the indefinite term "direction." How much better to have followed the third class of his predecessors who honestly assume a new axiom differing from Euclid's in form if not in essence. Of these the best is that called Playfair's; "Two lines which intersect can not both be parallel to the same line." The German article mentioned is followed by a carefully prepared list of ninety-two authors on the subject. In English an account of like attempts was given by Perronet Thompson, Cambridge, 1833, and is brought up to date in the charming volume, "Euclid and his Modern Rivals," by C. L. Dodgson, late Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church, Oxford. All this shows how ready the world was for the extraordinary flamingforth of genius from different parts of the world which was at once to overturn, explain, and remake not only all this subject but as consequence all philosophy, all ken-lore. As was the case with the discovery of the Conservation of Energy, the independent irruptions of genius, whether in Russia, Hungary, Germany, or even in Canada gave everywhere the same results. At first these results were not fully understood even by the brightest intellects. Thirty years after the publication of the book he mentions, we see the brilliant Clifford writing from Trinity College, Cambridge, April 2, 1870, "Several new ideas have come to me lately: First I have procured Lobatschewsky, 'Etudes Geometriques sur la Theorie des Parallels' a small tract of which Gauss, therein quoted, says: L'auteur a traite la matiere en main de maitre et avec le veritable esprit geometrique. Je crois devoir appeler votre attention sur ce livre, dont la lecture ne peut manquer de vous causer le plus vif plaisir.' Then says Clifford: "It is quite simple, merely Euclid without the vicious assumption, but the way the things come out of one another is quite lovely." The first axiom doubted is called a "vicious assumption," soon no man sees more clearly than Clifford that all are assumptions and none vicious. He had been reading the French translation by Houel, published in 1866, of a little book of 61 pages published in 1840 in Berlin under the title Geometrische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Parallellinien by a Russian, Nicolaus Ivanovitch Lobatschewsky (1793-1856), the first public expression of whose discoveries, however, dates back to a discourse at Kasan on February 12, 1826. Under this commonplace title who would have suspected the discovery of a new space in which to hold our universe and ourselves. A new kind of universal space; the idea is a hard one. To name it, all the space in which we think the world and stars live and move and have their being was ceded to Euclid as his by right of pre-emption, description, and occupancy; then the new space and its quick-following fellows could be called Non-Euclidean. Gauss in a letter to Schumacher, dated Nov. 28, 1846, mentions that as far back as 1792 he had started on this path to a new universe. Again he says: "La Geometrie non-Euclidienne ne renferme en elle rien de contradictoire, quoique, a premiere vue, beaucoup de ses resultats aien l'air de paradoxes. Ces contradictions apparents doivent etre regardees comme l'effet d'une illusion, due a l'habitude que nous avons prise de bonne heure de considerer la geometrie Euclidienne comme rigoureuse." But here we see in the last word the same imperfection of view as in Clifford's letter. The perception has not yet come that though the nonEuclidean geometry is rigorous, Euclid is not one whit less so. |