34. The English nation was not at all deficient in mathematicians during the fourteenth century; on the contrary, no other in Europe produced nearly so many. But their works have rarely been published. The great progress of physical science, since the invention of printing, has rendered these imperfect treatises interesting only to the curiosity of a very limited class of readers. Thus Richard Suisset, or Swineshead, author of a book entitled the Calculator, of whom Cardan speaks in such language as might be applied to himself, is scarcely known, except by name, to literary historians; and though it has once been printed, the book is of the extremest rarity.[275] But the most conspicuous of our English geometers was Thomas Bradwardin, archbishop of Canterbury; yet more for his rank, and for his theological writings, than for the arithmetical and geometrical speculations which give him a place in science. Montucla, with a carelessness of which there are too many instances in his valuable work, has placed Bradwardin, who died in 1348, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, though his work was printed in 1495.[276] [275] The character of Suisset’s book given by Brucker, iii. 852, who had seen it, does not seem to justify the wish of Leibnitz that it should be republished. It is a strange medley of arithmetical and geometrical reasoning with the scholastic philosophy. Kästner (Geschichte der Mathematik, i. 50) seems not to have looked at Brucker, and, like Montucla, has a very slight notion of the nature of Suisset’s book. His suspicion that Cardan had never seen the book he so much extols, because he calls the author the Calculator, which is the title of the work itself, seems unwarrantable. Suisset probably had obtained the name from his book, which is not uncommon; and Cardan was not a man to praise what he had never read. [276] It may be considered a proof of the attention paid to geometry in England, that two books of Euclid were read at Oxford about the middle of the fifteenth century. Churton’s Life of Smyth, p. 151, from the University Register. We should not have expected to find this. |Astronomy.| |Alchemy.|