"The most numerous efforts to remove the supposed defect in Euclid were attempts to prove the parallel postulate. After centuries of desperate but fruitless endeavor, the bold idea dawned upon the minds of several mathematicians that a geometry might be built up without assuming the parallel-axiom. While A. M. Legendre still endeavored to establish the axiom by rigid proof, Lobachevski brought out a publication which assumed the contradictory of that axiom, and which was the first of a series of articles destined to clear up obscurities in the fundamental concepts, and greatly to extend the field of geometry."