“Solid Loci,” probably a treatise on conics regarded as loci. Both these treatises are lost; the former was, of course, superseded by Apollonius’s great work on Conics in eight Books.
CHAPTER III.
THE WORKS OF ARCHIMEDES.
The range of Archimedes’s writings will be gathered from the list of his various treatises. An extraordinarily large proportion of their contents represents entirely new discoveries of his own. He was no compiler or writer of text-books, and in this respect he differs from Euclid and Apollonius, whose work largely consisted in systematising and generalising the methods used and the results obtained by earlier geometers. There is in Archimedes no mere working-up of existing material; his objective is always something new, some definite addition to the sum of knowledge.
Confirmation of this is found in the introductory letters prefixed to most of his treatises. In them we see the directness, simplicity and humanity of the man. There is full and generous recognition of the work of predecessors and contemporaries;