Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/38

 markable delay even after the receipt of the pension.

(10) The Cardinal's argument was founded on the non-existence of a centre, deduced from the non-existence of a circumference, to the universe. A book might be written on the manner in which purely subjective notions of the centre and its necessary properties influenced the arguments on this subject, from those of Cusa to those of the Sieur de Beaulieu (1676), who says that the presumption of Copernicus lead him to "advance in geometry a proposition as absurd as it is against faith and reason, by making the circumference of a circle fixed and immoveable, and the centre moveable, on which geometrical principle he maintained the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth."

(11) Weidler, in the History, gives a correct account of the work: in the Bibliography, which refers to the History (p. 337), he makes the mass of its contents to belong to the subsequent edition of 1561, and retains only the last three treatises in that of 1551. Lalande copies him, together with the reference "p. 337," and thus again seems to mistake the matter of his own reference.

[11] (12) A difficulty of this kind is far from uncommon. An editor leaves us in doubt as to whether the numbering of the edition refers to impressions, or to the impressions which that particular editor had superintended. It would be well if the word impression were used in the general sense and edition in the particular. Thus, if A publish four editions of his own work, and if the commentator B then publish three more, there will be seven impressions in editions of four and three; and the sixth impression of A's work will be B's second edition.

(13) An English auctioneer was brought to give evidence upon the catalogue of the British Museum, who declared that cataloguing was not only easy, but very simple indeed, with the assistance of the libra-