Excerpt from A Brief Introduction to the Infinitesimal Calculus: Designed Especially to Aid in Reading Mathematical Economics and Statistics
This little volume contains the substance of lectures by which I have been accustomed to introduce the more advanced of my students to a course in modern economic theory. I could find no text-book sufficiently brief for my purpose, nor one which distributed the emphasis in the desired manner. My object, however, in preparing my notes for publication has not been principally to provide a book for classroom use. It must be admitted that very few teachers of Economics as yet desire to address their students in the mathematical tongue. I have had in mind not so much the classroom as the study. Teachers and students alike, however little they care about the mathematical medium for their own ideas, are growing to feel the need of it in order to understand the ideas of others. I have frequently received inquiries, as doubtless have other teachers, for some book which would enable a person without special mathematical training or aptitude to understand the works of Jevons, Walras, Marshall, or Pareto, or the mathematical articles constantly appearing in the Economic Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Giornale degli Economisti, and elsewhere. It is such a book that I have tried to write.