"Among the contemporaries and pupils of Gauss... F. K. Schweikart, Professor of Law in , sent to Gauss in 1818 a page of MS. explaining a system of geometry which he calls "Astral Geometry," in which the sum of the angles of a triangle is always less than two right angles, and in which there is an absolute unit of length. He did not publish any account of his researches, but he induced his nephew, F.A. Taurinus, to take up the question. ...a few years later he attempted a treatment of the theory of parallels and having received some encouragement from Gauss he [Taurinus] published a small book, Theorie der Parallellinien, in 1825. After its publication he came across [J. W.] Camerer's new edition of Euclid in Greek and Latin, which in an Excursus to Euclid I. 29, contains a very valuable history of the theory of parallels, and there he found that his methods had been anticipated by Saccheri and Lambert. Next year, accordingly, he published another work, Oeometriae prima elementa and in the Appendix... works out some of the most important trigonometrical formulae for non-euclidean geometry by using the fundamental formulae of spherical geometry with an imaginary radius. Instead of the notation of hyperbolic functions, which was then scarcely in use, he expresses his results in terms of logarithms and exponentials, and calls his geometry the "Logarithmic Spherical Geometry." Though Taurinus must be regarded as an independent discoverer of non-euclidean trigonometry, he always retained the belief, unlike Gauss and Schweikart, that Euclidean geometry was necessarily the true one. Taurinus himself was aware, however, of the importance of his contribution... and it was a bitter disappointment to him when he found that his work attracted no attention. In disgust he burned the remainder of the edition of his Elementa, which is now one of the rarest of books."