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.

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 gov. ernment, 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.