Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/240

234 The small collection of Augustus De Morgan is worthy of note, as it furnished the stimulus for the publication of the first work dealing wholly with the bibliograhy of arithmetic, De Morgan's "Arithmetical Books," published in London in 1847. Of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries De Morgan described some seventy arithmetics, while the "Rara Arithmetica" describes well over four hundred. A quotation from the prefatory letter by the great English mathematician in which the book is inscribed to the Rev. George Peacock, a writer on the history of arithmetic, is worth giving: "The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the place of more important bodies." De Morgan's felicity of expression in his numerous publications—he was an extensive contributor to encyclopedias—suggests his kinship to the present popular novelist, William Frend De Morgan, his son.

While the "Arithmetical Books" by De Morgan dealt wholly with arithmetical works, many others have treated the bibliography of mathematics. One of the earliest to give fairly extensive bibliographical references to mathematical literature is the "Kitab al-Fihrist," or "Book of Records," an Arabic treatise written in A.D. 987. The mathematical section of this large book was translated into German by H. Suter and appeared in Leipzig in 1892. The author, who went by the melodious name of Abou'l-Faradsch Mohammed ibn Ishak, or more commonly by the name Ibn Abi Ja'kub al-Nadim, included all the writers known to him, of whatever nationality. The Kitab al-Fihrist is of the greatest importance in the history of mathematics, as it is, indeed, in the history of the development of Christianity, for the writer describes various early sects of the christians. An appreciably large part of our knowledge of Greek mathematics comes from such Arabic sources, for the Arabs kept the spark of Greek learning alive while Europe was in the darkest of the dark ages.

Our interest, however, is in the bibliographers who treated the early printed works. Gerard Joannis Vossius in 1650 published in Amsterdam his work, "On the Four Arts," which is an unreliable mixture of bibliographical and historical material. Naturally many histories of mathematics treated also the bibliography of the subject. The first German work to attempt a somewhat complete list of early printed books in mathematics was the "Einleitung zur mathematischen Bücherkentnis," which J. E. Scheibel completed in 1769 and of which at least two editions appeared. Other German publications, purely bibliographical, are F. G. A. Murhard's "Literatur der mathematischen Wissenschaften" of 1797 and J. Rogg's "Handbuch der mathematischen Literatur," which catalogued and described books from the invention of