236 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



JOHN DEE AND HIS "FRUITFUL PREFACE" 



By MARY ESTHER TRUEBLOOD 



MT. HOLYOKE COLLEGE 



IT may be necessary to introduce this " faithful student of the school 

 of verity," for his contribution to human thought was of the kind 

 that is easily absorbed in the sum total of the period, while the man 

 himself remains little known to any but his contemporaries. The 

 writer's introduction to him was through his " fruitful preface " to the 

 first translation of Euclid's " Elements " into English printed in 1570. 

 That long preface is an interesting document in the development of 

 intellectual freedom as well as in the history of science. It was ad- 

 dressed not so much to learned men as to the author's countrymen at 

 large, though there was an occasional side glance at the university 

 pedants. It expresses ideas strikingly like those for which the name 

 of Francis Bacon stands, though written when Bacon was a boy of nine 

 years. In it the author makes a vigorous appeal to the men of the time 

 to shake themselves free from the commentational habit of the middle 

 ages — to consider that the Greeks and Romans, who were held in such 

 reverence, had not achieved all that was to be achieved. " Master 

 Dee " was fully aware of the state of opinion that must be contended 

 against. He says : 



Well, I am nothing affrayde of the disdayne of some such, as thinke Sciences 

 and Artes to be but Seven. Perhaps those such may, with ignorance and shame 

 enough, come short of them seven also: and yet nevertheless they can not pre- 

 scribe a certaine number of Artes: and in each certain unpassable boundes, to 

 God, Nature, and man's Industrie. New Artes dayly rise up: and there was 

 no such order taken, that all Artes should in one age, or in one land, or of one 

 man be made knowen to the world. 



The immediate and ostensible purpose of the preface was to attract 

 attention to the newly translated " Elements." The author begins : 



Neither do I think it mete for so strange matter (as now is ment to be 

 published) and to so strange an audience, to be bluntly, at first put forth with- 

 out a peculiar Preface. 



In his pride in the achievements of England in the reign of 

 Elizabeth, John Dee was at one with his countrymen, and whether 

 consciously or unconsciously he appealed to men through the motive 

 dominant in that period when he explained at great length how the 

 " wonderful applications of mathematics " might be used for the glori- 

 fication of the country. At the same time, the author sounds in 

 advance a distinct seventeenth century note in suggesting that the laws 

 governing natural phenomena might be better understood by being 

 treated mathematically, and foreshadows the modern " Precisions and 

 Approximations-mathematik " when he speaks of " allowing somewhat 



