n six planks and a bit of rope?

MONTUCLA'S WORK ON THE QUADRATURE.

Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle ... avec une
addition concernant les problemes de la duplication du cube et de la
trisection de l'angle. Paris, 1754, 12mo. [By Montucla.]

This is _the_ history of the subject.[346] It was a little episode to the
great history of mathematics by Montucla, of which the first edition
appeared in 1758. There was much addition at the end of the fourth volume
of the second edition; this is clearly by Montucla, though the bulk of the
volume is put together, with help from Montucla's papers, by Lalande.[347]
There is also a second edition of the history of the quadrature, Paris,
1831, 8vo, edited, I think, by Lacroix; of which it is the great fault that
it makes hardly any use of the additional matter just mentioned.

Montucla is an admirable historian when he is writing from his own direct
knowledge: it is a sad pity that he did not tell us when he was depending
on others. We are not to trust a quarter of his book, and we must read many
other books to know which quarter. The fault is common enough, but
Montucla's good three-quarters is so good that the fault is greater in him
than in most others: I mean the fault of not acknowledging; for an
historian cannot read everything. But it must be said that mankind give
little encouragement to candor on this point. Hallam, in his {160} _History
of Literature_, states with his own usual instinct of honesty every case in
which he depends upon others: Montucla does not. And what is the
consequence?--Montucla is trusted, and believed in, and cried up in the
bulk; while the smallest talker can lament that Hallam should be so unequal
and apt to depend on others, without remembering to mention that Hallam
himself gives the information. As to a universal history of any great
subject being written entirely upon primary knowledge, it is a thing of
which the possibility is not yet proved by an example. Delambre attempted
it with astronomy, and was removed by death before it was finished,[348] to
say nothing of the gaps he left.

Montucla was nothing of a bibliographer, and his descriptions of books in
the first edition were insufficient. The Abbe Rive[349] fell foul of him,
and as the phrase is, gave it him. Montucla took it with great good humor,
tried to mend, and, in his second edition, wished his critic had lived to
see the _vernis de bibliographe_ whic