If you are restored in body, and other things go with you to your mind, well and good; and we too fare pretty well. At the time I was with you in Pergamum, I observed you were quite eager to be kept informed of the work I was doing in conics. And so I have sent you this first book revised, and we shall dispatch the others when we are satisfied with them. For I don't believe you have forgotten hearing from me how I worked out the plan for these conics at the request of Naucrates, the geometer, at the time he was with us in Alexandria lecturing, and how arranging them in eight books we immediately communicated them in great haste because of his near departure, not revising them but putting down whatever came to us with the intention of a final going over. And so finding now the occasion of correcting them, one book after another, we publish them. And since it happened that some others among those frequenting us got acquainted with the fist and second books before the revision, don't be surprised if you come upon them in a different form.

Of the eight books the first four belong to a course in the elements. The first book contains the generation of the three sections and of the opposite branches, and the principal properties in them worked out more fully and universally than in the writings of others. The second book contains the properties having to do with the diameters and axes and also the asymptotes, and other things of a general and necessary use for limits of possibility. And what I call diameters and what I call axes you will know from this book. The third book contains many incredible theorems of use for the construction of solid loci and for limits of possibility of which the greatest part and the most beautiful are new. And when we had grapsed these, we knew that the three-line and four-line locus had not been constructed by Euclid, but only a chance part of it and that not very happily. For it was not possible for this construction to be completed without the additional things found by us. The fourth book shows in how many ways the sections of a cone intersect with each other and with the circumference of a circle, and contains other things in addition none of which has been written up by our predecessors, that is in how many points the section of a cone or the circumference of a circle and the opposite branches meet the opposite branches. The rest of the books are fuller in treatment. For there is one dealing more fully with maxima and minima, and one with equal and similar sections of a cone, and one with limiting theorems, and one with determinate conic problems. And so indeed, with all them published, those happening upon them can judge them as they see fit. Good-bye.

Apollonius of Perga. Conics, translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 11, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 603.