Elements of Algebra

xxvi ADVERTISEMENT. I have endeavoured to translate this algebra in the style best suited to works of the kind. My chief anxiety was to enter into the sense of the original, and to render it with the greatest perspicuity. Perhaps I may presume to give my translation some superiority over the original, because that work having been dictated, and admitting of no revision from the author himself, it is easy to conceive that in many passages it would stand in need of correction. If I have not submitted to translate literally, I have not failed to follow my author step by step; I have preserved the same divisions in the articles, and it is only in so few places that I have taken the liberty of suppressing some details of calculation, and inserting one or two lines of illustration in the text, that I believe it unnecessary to enter into an explanation of the reasons by which I was justified in doing so. Nor shall I take any more notice of the notes which I have added to the first part. They are not so numerous as to make me fear the reproach of having unnecessarily increased the volume; and they may throw light on several points of mathematical history, as well as make known a great number of Tables that are of subsidiary utility. With respect to the correctness of the press, I believe it will not yield to that of the original. I have carefully compared all the calculations, and having repeated a great number of them myself, have by those means been enabled to correct several faults beside those which are indicated in the Errata.