Correspondence and papers of Edmond Halley : preceded by an unpublished memoir of his life by one of his contemporaries and the 'Éloge' / by D'Ortous de Mairan; arranged and edited by Eugene Fairfield MacPike.

  • Edmond Halley
Date:
[1937]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Correspondence and papers of Edmond Halley : preceded by an unpublished memoir of his life by one of his contemporaries and the 'Éloge' / by D'Ortous de Mairan; arranged and edited by Eugene Fairfield MacPike. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    secure Shipping of all sorts. Having seen these works finisht, Mr. Halley returnd to England, where he again Landed in the Month of October 1703, a little before the memorable Storm in November of that year.1 The Learned Dr. Wallis2 dying just after, Mr. Halley was by the Trustees of the Savillian Professorship at Oxford, chosen on the 8th of Jany. following 1703/4 to succeed him in the Geometry Chair of that University; which he held with the greatest reputation to his Death; not only reading constantly the several Lectures ap¬ pointed by the founder, but publishing also several Books for the service and advancement of the Science, and the honour of the University, to which he now again belong’d. In 1706 he publisht Apollonius’s book, De sectione Rationis,3 by him translated, or rather decypher’d, from an Arabic Manuscript, in the Bodleian Library; for he did not, at that time, understand the Arabic Tongue, but only translated the whole by the assistance of a very few pages of it already translated by Dr. Barnard, which he made use of, as a Key to the rest; and this he did with such success, through his being so great a Master of the Subject, that I remember the Learned Dr. Sykes, (our Hebrew Professor at Cambridge, and the greatest Orientalist of his time, when I was at that University,) told me, that Mr. Halley talking with him upon the subject, shew’d him two or 3 passages which wanted Emmendation, telling him what the Author said, and what he shou’d have said, and which Dr. Sykes found he might with great ease be made to say, by small corrections, he was by this means enabled to make in the Text. Thus, I remember, Dr. Sykes expresst himself, Mr. Halley made Emendations to the Text of an Author, he could not so much as read the language of. To the translation of this valuable piece, now first publisht, he added his own restitution of the two Books of the same Author, De Sectione Spatii, which are lost, from the account given of these books by Pappus; and following close the method of Apollonius himself, in his other works. In 1710 he publisht his fine Edition in Folio of Apollonius’s Conicks, and Serenus’s Sections of the Cone and Cylinder; the latter in Greek and Latin, and also the Former as far as the End of the 4th Book, to which he added the 5th 6th and 7th which he translated from Arabic, and the 8 th which he restored entirely, as he had done the books de Sectione Spatii, by the help of Pappus’s Lemmata, still extant in Greek, and by him intended for the Demonstration of the 8th as well as the 7th book 1 Biog. Brit., vol. iv, p. 2512. 2 John Wallis (1616-1703). (See Appendix XIV.) 3 Biog. Brit.y vol. iv, p. 2513, note [kk].
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