hi PREFACE. 



book De Gencratlo?ie et Corrupt'ionc : Nor has even Plato aded with 

 good faith towards the Philofophers before him ; for he has no where 

 acknowledged the obligations he owed to the Priefts of Egypt, from 

 whom, befides what he learned of Myftical Theology, particularly 

 concerning the dodrine of the Trinity, w^hich he kept as a fecret, to 

 be communicated but to a few of his followers, I have no doubt but 

 he learned there to folve the Delian Problem, as it is called, I mean, 

 to double the cube of the Altar of Apollo in Delos, which, from 

 the account Plato lumfelf gives of the ft ate of geometry in Greece, 

 it is impoflible he could have learned there. And though he has 

 taken his whole natural Philofphy from Timaeus the Locrian, he 

 has acknowledged the obligation no otherwife than by giving his 

 name to one of his dialogues, and making him an interlocutor in it. 

 And if Proclus had not preferved to us that moft valuable piece of 

 antient Philofophy, entitled De Jnima Mimdi^ we fliould never have 

 known that Timseus had written upon the fubjed, or that Plato had 

 taken from that writing his whole Cofmogony *. In fbort, it appears 

 to me, that the Philofophers in Greece wanted to perfuade the world 

 that all Science and Philofophy was originally of the growth of their 

 countr}', w^hich, I think, I have lliown was far from being the 

 truth f. 



4/0. But to come clofer to the point ; it is evident that Ariftotle, 

 among other Pythagorean books he got into his hands, being, as I 

 have faid, a great colledor of books, got hold of a Treatife of 



Archytas 



* I cannot help here contrafting the want of good faith and candour of Plato and 

 Ariftotle with a very different behaviour of another Philofopher of later times, viz. Jam- 

 blichus, who has given us a fyftem of Arithmetic, but which he confeffes he has taken, for 

 the greater part, from the work of a Pythagorean Philofopher, Nichomachus by name. 

 Tiiis he has told us in the introduction to his work, where he fays, that he profefTes 

 only to deliver what had been difcovered by the antients upon the fubjeds, and par- 

 ticularly by Nicomachus, without adding or taking away any thing. 



f The Pythagoreans themfelves faid, That all that was valuable in the Philofophy of 

 Plato and Ariftotle was taken from them. See Porphyry and Jamblichus in Vita Pyih.'gora, 



