Notes and Conventions

In the present part of the book, a selection of 180 folio pages documenting Harriot’s work on projectile motion and the motion of fall is presented as facsimile and as transcription on facing pages.¹ The selection of folio pages was made in the course of a survey of the total of over 10,000 pages that constitute Harriot’s manuscripts and aims at completeness. Due to the disordered state of the manuscripts it is likely, however, that some notes relevant to the topic have gone unnoticed. There are furthermore folios bearing notes on related topics which have deliberately been excluded from this selection but shall, for the sake of completeness, be mentioned here. These are

• folios bearing notes on “the fall of water” (G-187r-G-203v)

• folios bearing notes on difformly difform motion, mainly based on propositions from Thomas Alvarus’ Liber de triplici motu (H-41r, H-42r, H-44r, H-45r)

• some of the folios bearing notes on motion along inclined planes (G-343r, G-344r, G-345r)

• a folio bearing rough sketches, possibly on motion along inclined planes (G-81r, v)

• folios bearing notes possibly related to f. G-132v and the question of the variation of the initial velocity with the elevation (G-133v, G-134v)

• a folio bearing notes on the distance at different times between two bodies moving uniformly with different velocities (H-103r) and containing diagrams possibly related to motion (H-103v)

• folios bearing notes on the collision of bodies (G-88r, v, G-120r, G-221r-G-228v, G-346v ff., H-6r, S-23r-S-31r), and

• folios bearing notes on experiments on specific weights (G-75r, v, G-76r, v, G-92r, G-93r, G-95r, G-96r, G-98r-G-108v, G-112r, v, G-113r, v, G-166r-G-171r, G-176r-G-178r, G-229r-G-230v, G-237r-G-249v).