Note 275 — Chapter II
Reading edition
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.