A bibliography of English military books up to 1642 and of ...

grouping works on them except in one class. By the time they
were entirely separated chivalry itself was no more.
And now as to the arrangement of this catalogue.
I have thought it inadvisable to hinge that on the accident of
an author's name or initial.
Placed in the chronological order, the
title-pages alone form a military history in miniature.
In reading
through them as they occur here, we trace the descent of one book
from another, we watch the military art at perhaps the most interesting
phase of its development, when, unwilling to cut itself
adrift from theories and practices consecrated by the conformity of
wellnigh two thousand years, but forced on by the exigencies of the
recently-invented artillery, it was painfully endeavouring to adapt
itself to a new order which was to lead, step by step, to the system
of the; present day. Ranged among its contemporaries, "the most
worthless book of a bygone age," says De Morgan,^ "is a record
worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may
render it unavailable for most purposes, but it serves, in hands which
know how to use it, to determine the places of more important
bodies." The chronological order must be preferred, especially
where it is a question of the value of a work and its influence,
when it must be weighed against others of its own time, not against
those of a later and more advanced stage. Though, for a view of
the state of the theory and practice of artillery during the sixteenth
century, the student would go to Firrufino rather than to
Tartaglia, he would not, therefore, rank the intelligent summary of
the one above the original treatise of the other, for all
its fallacies.
One book, Vere's "Commentaries", written before 1642, but
printed after that date, is placed in its chronological order at the
end ; circulating, if at all, in manuscript only, it would have had
no appreciable influence when first written, and its value would,
therefore, never have been other than historical.
*
"Arithmetical Books", London, 1847, p. ii. . . .
xxiii