gravity of a parallelogram, a triangle and a parallel-trapezium respectively.
Book II., in ten propositions, is entirely devoted to finding the centre of gravity of a parabolic segment, an elegant but difficult piece of geometrical work which is as usual confirmed by the method of exhaustion.
CHAPTER VII.
HYDROSTATICS.
The science of hydrostatics is, even more than that of statics, the original creation of Archimedes. In hydrostatics he seems to have had no predecessors. Only one of the facts proved in his work On Floating Bodies, in two books, is given with a sort of proof in Aristotle. This is the proposition that the surface of a fluid at rest is that of a sphere with its centre at the centre of the earth.
Archimedes founds his whole theory on two postulates, one of which comes at the beginning and the other after Prop. 7 of Book I. Postulate 1 is as follows:—
“Let us assume that a fluid has the property that, if