Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.60

c13.60

It has been pretended, that traces of the art are to be discovered in the writings of the Grecian geometers, and particularly in the five first propositions of Euclid’s thirteenth book; whether, as Wallis conjectures, what we there have be the work of Theon or some other ancient scholiast, rather than of Euclid himself: Also examples of analytic investigation in Pappus;⁹¹ and indications of a method somewhat of a like nature with algebra, or at least the effects of it, in the works of Archimedes and Apollonius; though they are supposed to have very studiously concealed this their art of invention.⁹²