PREFACE.

Furthermore, we will gladly and gratefully receive any sound and wholesome advice that is offered to us in a friendly and candid spirit for the advancement or correction of this institution. In the meantime, we commend our efforts in promoting the public good to the benevolence, generosity, and patronage of our best Friends, Supporters, and Patrons, again and again. Given at Altdorf and Nuremberg, on the 17th of September, in the year of the Restoration of Salvation 1731.

Therefore, these letters sent to many of our academic colleagues met with approval almost everywhere, as they deserved. So much so, that already at the beginning of the year 1732, some of the associates were contributing money, and others books, for these literary uses. When our President himself, a man most tenacious and studious of his own excellent counsel, confirmed and further illustrated this laudable example with singular munificence and generosity, many others soon arose as emulators of this excellent deed. From this it happened that, not long after, a suitable place had to be sought where these gifts could be preserved; which was then established in Nuremberg by the Illustrious BAIERVS Baier. (See his letter of invitation.) Indeed, that excellent man was barely allowed to perceive the first fruits of these remarkable efforts; for when, on the 14th of July, in the year 1735, he was snatched away by a premature death from the entire republic of letters, and especially from our Academy, the collected library apparatus amounted to only 194 volumes.

Thus, after BAIERVS died, when I was chosen as President of the Academy by the common suffrage of the most excellent Adjuncts, and had received all the property belonging to our Academy, I immediately directed my greatest and primary care to the end that I might accurately follow in the footsteps of the illustrious former Presidents, and with the same ardor, as far as I could, I might carefully look to the health and growth of the Academy. But with this intention, the care for increasing and further adorning our small library was by no means to be neglected by me.