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 France 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 libraty 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 hterature, 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. ven 
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. 
