appendix elements seven books von cowley john lodge euclid (1 Ergebnisse)

COWLEY, John Lodge. An Appendix to the Elements of Euclid, in Seven Books. [4], 14 pp, with xlii ff. plates. 4to., 295 x 240 mm, bound in original boards with a new cloth spine. London: T. Cadell, n.d. [ca. 1765]. Second Edition, improved and enlarged, of this ingenius geometrical primer by John Lodge Cowely (1719-1787?), who was a fellow of the Royal Academy and Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. The engraved diagrams are printed on heavy paper and then cut and scored to enable the reader to fold them into polyhedra, thus demonstrating the doctrines of the 11th, 12th, and 15th books of Euclid. This elaborate book design remains to this day a marvelous teaching tool. In its day it would also have been especially useful to cabinet makers and and all sorts of builders, who could use the models in the book to build simple solids and compound mathematical bodies on any scale. This second edition contains "sundry additions and improvements" to the first edition, "in which the Solids contained in the first and third books hereof, with the addition of their section-planes, are shewn by a new and more expressive method of exhibiting them; the number of irregular solids is also considerably increased by the addition of others, whose formations, far as I know, are wholly new; and the sixth book is made more extensively useful by a farther consideration of the doctrine of planes described in the definitions and propositions of the eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid" (-Cowley's introduction to the Second Edition). Cowley's mathematical textbooks were extremely popular in their day, widely disseminated and well used, and are rarely found intact. As early as 1806 this work was recorded as "scarce" by Adam Clarke in The Bibliographical Miscellany (cf. Sotheran). The present copy, in its clean and untorn state, is rare thus; it was exhibited at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Rouen, Livres Animés exhibition of 1982 (cf. exhibition catalogue by Charles Nicaise, no. 15). Lowndes II, p. 540. Sotheran I, 7670. ESTC 132908.