STUDY OF EUCLID IN THE MIDDLE AGES 369
lectures on the Sphaera mundi, planetary theory, three Books
of Euclid, optics and arithmetic. At Leipzig (founded 1409),
as at Vienna and Prague, there were lectures on Euclid for
some time at all events, though Hankel says that he found no
mention of Euclid in a list of lectures given in the consecutive
years 1437-8, and Regiomontanus, when he went to Leipzig,
found no fellow-students in geometry. At Oxford, in the
middle of the fifteenth century, the first two Books of Euclid
were read, and doubtless the Cambridge course was similar.
The first English editions.
After the issue of the first printed editions of Euclid,
beginning with the translation -of Campano, published by
Ratdolt, and. of the editio princeps of the Greek text (1533),
the study of Euclid received a great impetus, as is shown
by the number of separate editions and commentaries which
appeared in the sixteenth century. The first complete English
translation by Sir Henry Billingsley (1570) was a monumental
work of 928 pages of folio size, with a preface by John Dee,
and notes extracted from all the most important commentaries
from Proclus down to Dee himself, a magnificent tribute to
the immortal Euclid. About the same time Sir Henry Savile
began to give unpaid lectures on the Greek geometers; those
on Euclid do not indeed extend beyond I. 8, but they are
valuable because they deal with the difficulties connected with
the preliminary matter, the definitions, &c., and the tacit
assumptions contained in the first propositions. But it was
in the period from about 1660 to 1730, during which Wallis
. and Halley were Professors at Oxford, and Barrow and
Newton at Cambridge, that the study of Greek mathematics
was at its height in England. As regards Euclid in particular
Barrow’s influence was doubtless very great. His Latin
version (Euclidis Elementorum Libri XV hreviter demon-
strati) came out in 1655, and there were several more editions
of the same published up to 1732; his first English edition
appeared in 1660, and was followed by others in 1705, 1722,
1732,1751. This brings us to Simson’s edition, first published
both in Latin and English in 1756. It is presumably from
this time onwards that Euclid acquired the unique status as
1523 B b
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