not hesitate to say that certain problems baffled him for a long time; in one place he positively insists, for the purpose of pointing a moral, on specifying two propositions which he had enunciated but which on further investigation proved to be wrong.
The ordinary MSS. of the Greek text of Archimedes give his works in the following order:—
- On the Sphere and Cylinder (two books). 2. Measurement of a Circle. 3. On Conoids and Spheroids. 4. On Spirals. 5. On Plane Equilibriums (two books). 6. The Sandreckoner. 7. Quadrature of a Parabola.
A most important addition to this list has been made in recent years through an extraordinary piece of good fortune. In 1906 J. L. Heiberg, the most recent editor of the text of Archimedes, discovered a palimpsest of mathematical content in the “Jerusalemic Library” of one Papadopoulos Kerameus at Constantinople. This proved to contain writings of Archimedes copied in a good hand of the tenth century. An attempt had been made (fortunately with only partial success) to wash