The _Opus Palatinum_, a work published in 1596, containing an extensive
collection of trigonometrical tables, affords a remarkable instance of a
tabular error; which, as it is not generally known, it may not be
uninteresting to mention here. After that work had been for several
years in circulation in every part of Europe, it was discovered that the
commencement of the table of co-tangents and co-secants was vitiated by
an error of considerable magnitude. In the first co-tangent the last
nine places of figures were incorrect; but from the manner in which the
numbers of the table were computed, the error was gradually, though
slowly, diminished, until at length it became extinguished in the
eighty-sixth page. After the detection of this extensive error, Pitiscus
undertook the recomputation of the eighty-six erroneous pages. His
corrected calculation was printed, and the erroneous part of the
remaining copies of the _Opus Palatinum_ was cancelled. But as the
corrected table of Pitiscus was not published until 1607,--thirteen
years after the original work,--the erroneous part of the volume was
cancelled in comparatively few copies, and consequently correct copies
of the work are now exceedingly rare. Thus, in the collection of tables
published by M. Schulze,[11] the whole of the erroneous part of the _Opus
Palatinum_ has been adopted; he having used the copy of that work which
exists in the library of the Academy of Berlin, and which is one of
those copies in which the incorrect part was not cancelled. The
corrected copies of this work may be very easily distinguished at
present from the erroneous ones: it happened that the former were
printed with a very bad and worn-out type, and upon paper of a quality
inferior to that of the original work. On comparing the first eighty-six
pages of the volume with the succeeding ones, they are, therefore,
immediately distinguishable in the corrected copies. Besides this test,
there is another, which it may not be uninteresting to point out:--At
the bottom of page 7 in the corrected copies, there is an error in the
position of the words _basis_ and _hypothenusa_, their places being
interchanged. In the original uncorrected work this error does not
exist.
[Footnote 11: _Recueil des Tables Logarithmiques et Trigonometriques_.
Par J. C. Schulze. 2 vols. Berlin: 1778.]
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