xviii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION. 



should, at the end of the book Tomus Secun- 

 dus, pp. 265-322. 



The now world renowned Appendix by 

 Bolyai Janos was an afterthought of the 

 father, who prompted the son not "to occupy 

 himself with the theory of parallels," as 

 Staeckel says, but to translate from the Ger- 

 man into Latin a condensation of his treatise, 

 of which the principles were discovered and 

 properly appreciated in 1823, and which w-as 

 given in writing to Johann Walter von Eck- 

 wehr in 1825. 



The father, without waiting for- Vol. II, 

 inserted this Latin translation, with separate 

 paging (1-26), as an Appendix to his Vol. I, 

 where, counting a page for the title and a 

 page "Explicatio signorum," it has twenty- 

 six numbered pages, followed by two unnum- 

 bered pages of Errata. 



The treatise itself, therefore, contains only 

 twenty-four pages the most extraordinary 

 two dozen pages in the whole history of 

 thought! 



Milton received but a paltry 5 for his 

 Paradise Lost; but it was at least plus 5. 



Bolyai Janos, as we learn from Vol. II, p. 

 384, of ef Tentamen" contributed for the 



