Lot Essay
A FINE COPY in modest binding and with no indications of institutional ownership. Jacob Bernoulli's posthumous treatise, the title of which refers in a literal sense to the "casting" of dice, was edited by his nephew, and to this day provides the basis, not so much for gambling methods, as insurance, statistics, mathematical heredity tables, and even opinion polls. The work is divided into four parts, the first a commentary on Huygens's De ratiociniis in aleae ludo (1657), the second a treatise on permutations and combinations (the former Bernoulli's own term), the third an application of the theory of combinations to various games of chance, and the final, more discursive part a philosophical consideration of probability as a measurable degree of certainty, necessity and chance, of moral versus mathematical expectation, and of a priori and a posteriori probability.