Our main purpose in this book is to present an English translation of Desargues' Rough Draft of an Essay on the results of taking plane sections of a cone (1639), the pamphlet with which the modem study of projective geometry began. Despite its acknowledged importance in the history of mathematics, the work has never been translated before in its entirety, although short extracts have appeared in several source books. The problems of making Desargues' work accessible to modem mathematicians and historians of mathematics have led us to provide a fairly elaborate introduction, and to include...