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

394 113. Tartini to G.R. Carli Padua, 17 August 1754. Here, for Your Most Illustrious Lordship, are twelve copies of my book, which is finally published, in which I have two serious interests, which I sincerely confide to Your Most Illustrious Lordship. Not having been able to avoid its printing, but having chosen the lesser evil of wanting it to be printed in front of my eyes, I had to accept responsibility, at the printing shop of this Seminary (unused to the printing of music) for any faults that could result. And so, if the book is sold, the profit goes to the seminary; if not, the cost is mine. Your Most Illustrious Lordship can clearly see my primary interest in the sale of the book. The second interest regards the substance of the things included. New things in the physical and demonstrative genre, and if not entirely new in themselves, certainly new in language, method and application. I am sure that, as I shall have no opposition among musicians, I will surely have some among mathematicians, despite having behaved with great caution, as I wanted that which pertains to the demonstrative genre to be examined for months and years by distinguished men, known to Your Reverence and to the learned world. The smallest paralogism could never be found, and some difficulties alone were raised with regard to terms of which I sometimes make use that are different from the common language, but always explained. In this sense, it may be that there are in my treatise paralogisms of words without their being in the things, and this with regard to the common language of mathematicians, but never with regard to my language; hence a hindrance pertaining to form, not to substance. But the fundamental hitch is this. You will see both in the treatise which serves as an introduction to the understanding of the book, and in the second and third chapters (all of a demonstrative genre) that I use the common arithmetical numbers, but they are intended and demonstrated with a completely different meaning than the common one, by force of which any irrational line is not only named, but also analysed, reducing it to the first principle and to that a priori proportion from which it proceeds. Therefore, one clearly discovers that there is a demonstrative science which has hitherto been unknown, inseparable from the harmonic system, and dependent upon a principle of greater import than that of the more commonly known principles. I ask Your Most Illustrious Lordship to examine most rigorously what I am confiding here to you, with reference to my book. If you find it to be so, you can readily imagine the muttering and criticism of the outraged mathematicians of weak spirit, when the principles of this science are placed before their eyes by a lowly violin player. It is true that in the truly illustrious class of such people one also finds people of strong spirit and lovers of the truth; but you know better than I do that they are the very few, not the many. Nonetheless, if the few are persuaded, the matter will have an excellent conclusion; and added to the other mathematical sciences will also be this one, which would finally be honoured and be able