FIRST EDITION, Edmund Stone's extremely rare schoolbook translation of eight of the fifteen books of Euclid. In his 'To the Reader' preface Stone castigates previous and much reprinted translators of Barrow's Latin text, as well pointing out that it is better to have the graphics placed individually on the page rather than multiply in folding plates at the end where 'the Learner's Attention to the Proposition he is reading, will be interrupted...Nay, even a Mathematician of a Languid Taste, will lay a book aside, rather than take the trouble of seeking out the Figure...' Stone himself was a self taught mathematician who operated under the patronage of the Duke of Argyll. He is best remembered for his treatise on mathematical instruments of 1723, but wrote several other significant mathematical treatises, including a dictionary. His Euclid was taken up and absorbed by several later writers, but this first printing is rare: E