Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

360 geometrician, and of a geometrician with insight. The musician participates to explain to the geometrician (whom one supposes to be ignorant about music) our musical matters, and nothing more. The other is that, given that I want my treatise to be examined there, and do not want it to return here after a year without any conclusion, it is indeed an absolute necessity that either the Most Revered Signor Dottor Balbi does us the favour of placing a substitute in his stead (there is no lack of such men there) since he is not able to do it, and this must be an honest man, and capable of secrecy; or, if Signor Dottor Balbi does not want to do this favour, I ask Your Reverence, to whom I give full freedom of choice on this matter, to find such a man. If the choice falls upon someone who is mercenary, he will be paid abundantly; if upon a man of a certain standing, I shall do my duties in a suitable way. Meanwhile, Your Reverence should be persuaded that by following the path and the method we have hitherto followed we shall never obtain anything, because the method of examination is wrong. My treatise is indeed founded upon the physical, but this is inseparable from the demonstrations, and the demonstrations are inseparable from the two figures, the square and the circle. What is the purpose, then, of raising objections against the phenomenon? One must raise them (if possible) against the demonstrations, and these alone must be examined in depth, since with regard to the truth and reality of the phenomenon all discussion is superfluous. Even a deaf person can hear it, and I have at least two dozen students around Europe who show it to anyone who has the ear for it. Consequently, any dispute on the reality of the same, on its reason, and on its comparison to other known phenomena becomes quite useless. The phenomenon exists, and the phenomenon is joined to, and inseparable from, the demonstrations founded upon the two figures. This, in a few words, is the substance; and therefore, either the demonstrations are true or they are not. If not, my proposition and consequence will not be true. Therefore, the examination falls necessarily on the demonstrations, and not in the slightest on the phenomenon, in any possible way. I ask Your Reverence to think carefully about what I am writing, and you will find it to be true. I would not want, then (and I have always suspected this), that regardless of my having forewarned the Most Illustrious Signor Dottor Balbi from the beginning, by cautioning him not to anticipate judgement on an endeavour of such nature, but to examine the treatise with patience and attention, that he formed his judgement regardless and believes the whole treatise, along with the phenomenon itself, to be the effect and product of an overheated brain. To see that he wants nothing to do with it makes me suspect this with good reason, having seen from a hundred examples what good qualities he has. In that case, I do not know what to tell him more than what I have already said to him. But to Your Reverence I say with all the frankness of a man, who (as the saying goes) has a birdbrain, that if the most esteemed Signor Dottor Balbi is really moved by this reason not to get involved, this time he is mistaken; and it is a most evident and powerful sign that he has not even read the whole treatise, or if he has read it, he has not read it carefully. Two things seem