TO THE READER

Preface.

Jacques Besson of Dauphiné, a most ingenious Mathematician to the King of the French, in order to draw from the most abstruse fountains of the mathematical and mechanical arts, and to cultivate those things which might most conduce to the public good and satisfy the studies of more distinguished minds, was willing to spurn many inconveniences of life, to undergo many dangers, to undertake the longest and most difficult travels, to consume his whole life, and to refuse no study or labor; for if he had chosen to flee these things, and from an early age had thought to gain fame for himself fortified solely by the authority of the ancients and by interpolated meditations, he would not have attained that knowledge of abstruse things which, to the best of his ability, he professed for the benefit of all. But among the monuments of a man of sublime genius and ingenious thoughts, constructed with wondrous art, the Theatre of immense labor presents itself to be seen, filled with instruments and machines both most delightful to the eye and most useful in their operation. He hoped, for the sake of those who study, to add many plates to this work, and to append an explanation which would teach those less versed in Mathematics. But when the memory of past labors, and the difficulty of those which he saw needed to be undertaken, called the man back from his plan—as he was most often established in an uncertain way of life—and fearing also that while he was laboring to complete the work and perfect it in all respects, he might be forestalled by death, and this better part of him perish with him, he found certain most excellent craftsmen and arranged for what we offer you to be engraved upon copper plates. But while he was beginning both the explanation of this laborious Theatre, and an appendix of new inventions, and some other works of no inferior note—namely, the invention of proportionally following Geometrical lines, the Elements of converting oblique magnitudes into straight ones in two books, and a third containing exercises of both, all found and devised with such sharpness of genius that certain most expert Mathematicians affirmed that nothing more useful had ever existed in Mathematics—he ceased to live for himself and for others for whom he was born. Meanwhile, we wish all to be admonished that no illustration of instruments, no illustration of machines in this work, is anything but new and invented by the art of Besson, and has been proven by experience, and furthermore is supported and enclosed by the most firm reasons and necessary arguments, both from Mathematics and from Physics: and this to such a degree that we dare to affirm that it is not the work of an idle or delicate man, or one educated in the shade; for he endured many hardships for it, and spent his resources on the greatest things; and, to speak briefly, he who is not satisfied by a work adorned with so many excellent machines and instruments will appear to labor under the disease of envy and ingratitude (unless he produces better things). FAREWELL.