234 LHE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
The small collection of Augustus De Morgan is worthy of note, as it 
furnished the stimulus for the publication of the first work dealing 
wholly with the bibliograhy of arithmetic, De Morgan’s “ Arithmetical 
Books,” published in London in 1847. Of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries De Morgan described some seventy arithmetics, while the 
“Rara Arithmetica” describes well over four hundred. A quotation 
from the prefatory letter by the great English mathematician in which 
the book is inscribed to the Rey. George Peacock, a writer on the history 
of arithmetic, is worth giving: “The most worthless book of a bygone 
day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its 
obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, 
in hands which know how to use it, to determine the place of more 
important bodies.” De Morgan’s felicity of expression in his numerous 
publications—he was an extensive contributor to encyclopedias—sug- 
gests his kinship to the present popular novelist, William Frend De 
Morgan, his son. 
While the “ Arithmetical Books” by De Morgan dealt wholly with 
arithmetical works, many others have treated the bibliography of mathe- 
matics. One of the earliest to give fairly extensive bibliographical 
references to mathematical literature is the “Kitab al-Fihrist,” or 
“ Book of Records,” an Arabic treatise written in A.D. 987. The mathe- 
matical section of this large book was translated into German by H. 
Suter and appeared in Leipzig in 1892. The author, who went by the 
melodious name of Abou’l-Faradsch Mohammed ibn Ishak, or more com- 
monly by the name Ibn Abi Ja‘kub al-Nadim, included all the writers 
known to him, of whatever nationality. The Kitab al-Fihrist is of the 
greatest importance in the history of mathematics, as it is, indeed, in 
the history of the development of christianity, for the writer describes 
various early sects of the christians. An appreciably large part of our 
knowledge of Greek mathematics comes from such Arabic sources, for 
the Arabs kept the spark of Greek learning alive while Europe was in 
the darkest of the dark ages. 
Our interest, however, is in the bibliographers who treated the early 
printed works. Gerard Joannis Vossius in 1650 published in Amster- 
dam his work, “ On the Four Arts,” which is an unreliable mixture of 
bibliographical and historical material. Naturally many histories of 
mathematics treated also the bibliography of the subject. The first 
German work to attempt a somewhat complete list of early printed 
books in mathematics was the “ Einleitung zur mathematischen Biicher- 
kentnis,” which J. E. Scheibel completed in 1769 and of which at least 
two editions appeared. Other German publications, purely bibliograph- 
ical, are F. G. A. Murhard’s “ Literatur der mathematischen Wissen- 
schaften” of 1797 and J. Rogg’s “Handbuch der mathematischen 
Literatur,” which catalogued and described books from the invention of 
