OF PLANE CURVES WITH NUMEROUS EXAMPLES BY T. H. EAGLES, M.A. INSTRUCTOR IN GEOMETRICAL DRAWING AND LECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1885 [All Rights reserved.] 1837. 2.10 PREFACE. THE appearance of another text-book on Geometry may perhaps be considered to demand an apology, but I venture to hope that an examination of the following pages will shew them to differ considerably from any existing treatise. The extending use of graphic methods in the solution of many practical engineering problems has appeared to me to demand a corresponding extension in the practice of drawing the curves on which such solutions may frequently depend, and, though the properties of conic sections have been discussed thoroughly both geometrically and analytically, there is so far as I am aware no book treating of the actual delineation of the curves from given data to anything like the extent here attempted. Independently however of their applied use, the problems generally will, I think, be found useful merely as drawing exercises in science and other schools. A great deal of attention is devoted to the construction of regular polygons, circles packed into another circle and similar fancy figures, by methods which no practical draughtsman ever uses, while the construction of an ellipse is at the most limited to drawing it from the principal axes or from a pair of conjugate diameters; and the time spent on these and similar exercises might, I think, E. b |