Numerous woodcuts in the text. Much Greek printing. 5 p.l., liii, 168 pp. 8vo, cont. panelled calf, remains of label on spine. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1706.

First edition of Halley’s translation of Apollonius’s “cutting off a ratio” from an Arabic manuscript. This text of Apollonius, like Books V-VII of the Conics, survives only in Arabic, and in this case the Arabic remains unpublished.

“Much of Halley’s scholarship was exercised upon the works of Apollonius of Perga, one of the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, and indeed of all time, who flourished in the latter part of the third century B.C. One... More