A UNIQUE COLLECTION OF ARITHMETICS 233 



reasons when he was twenty-eight years old, he took up his residence in 

 Paris and later became a French citizen. His remarkable ability won 

 him in the brief space of three years the chair of mathematics in the 

 College of Prance and admission to the Academy of Sciences as suc- 

 cessor to the great French geometer, Legendre. His activity extended 

 to the political field as inspector-general of public instructon and later 

 as inspector-general of the libraries of France. Soon difficulties of 

 another nature overtook him, as he was accused of appropriating books 

 and manuscripts from French libraries to his own use, in spite of the 

 fact that he had previously offered his valuable collection as a whole, 

 consisting of some 30,000 books and 2,000 manuscripts to the Royal 

 Library of Paris on the rejected condition that it be kept intact as the 

 Libri Collection. His conviction of the misuse of the national libraries 

 occurred, many say unjustly, in 1805 and he was again an exile, living 

 in England as a fugitive from the law; we will not say justice. His 

 library was sold at auction in England, many of the works finding their 

 way into the hands of Prince Boncompagni and after the dispersal of 

 his library into the Plimpton collection and the private library of 

 David Eugene Smith. 



Prince Baldassarre Boncompagni, who gathered together a second 

 famous collection of mathematical books and manuscripts, came nat- 

 urally by his interest in scientific work, as he belonged to that same 

 princely family as Pope Gregory XIII., who revised the calendar. 

 While eminent as a contributor to mathematical literature, Boncom- 

 pagni' s greater service was as a patron of the science. At his own ex- 

 pense he published the " Bulletin of the Bibliography and History of 

 the Mathematical and Physical Sciences," running through twenty 

 volumes, with many valuable contributions by German, French and 

 Italian scholars to the history of mathematics and astronomy. Even 

 more important were his numerous publications in regard to Leonard 

 of Pisa, who flourished at the beginning of the thirteenth century and 

 to whom was due in a large measure the spread of the Arabic numerals 

 in Italy and Europe. The publications of Boncompagni included two 

 large volumes of the writings of Leonard of Pisa and two Latin versions 

 of the Arabic work of Mohammed ben Musa, al-Khowarazmi, who made 

 the Hindu art of reckoning known to the Arabs in the early ninth 

 century ; these Latin versions were made by a Spaniard and an English- 

 man, both of whom studied at that Moslem center of learning, Toledo, 

 in the early twelfth century. Prince Boncompagni's magnificent col- 

 lection was offered, on certain mild conditions, to the city of Rome, but 

 was refused. While in printed works of the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries this library was not as complete as is the Plimpton, yet the 

 equal of this collection of old mathematical manuscripts will doubtless 

 never again be held by any private library. The sale at auction of these 

 books took place as recently as 1898. 



