Volume 5 of Daniel Bernoulli's "Works" includes the publication of his contributions to fluid dynamics. It contains seven of his papers which are linked in various ways to problems of fluid motion and which he wrote or completed in Basel after he left Petersburg. The first text published in this volume is Daniel Bernoulli's letter to Johann Daniel Schopflin, which is an announcement of his yet unpublished treatise (1734). Here the word "Hydrodynamica" appears for the first time. Next follows Bernoulli's greatest and largest work: "Hydrodynamica". Bernoulli's separate paper on the impact of water jet on a plane obstacle follows this treatise. Two texts from the 18th century supplementing this part of the volume are closely linked to the subject of Bernoulli's "Hydrodynamica": John Allan's little known paper (1730) on the reactive motion of vessels and a paper by Georg Wolfgang Krafft (1741) which contains an experimental confirmation of Bernoulli's results regarding the impact pressure of a fluid jet.
The second part of the volume includes two of Daniel Bernoulli's memoirs - one on the nature of winds, the other on ocean currents - which he presented to competitions of the Berlin and Paris Academies of Science in 1746 and 1751, respectively. This part also contains three smaller papers that are devoted to the study of atmospheric pressure and of the height of locations above the sea level. Two papers appended to this part are linked to Bernoulli's competition memoir on the nature of winds and assist in its correct placement in the history of dynamical meteorology: George Hadley's paper on trade winds (1735) and Christlob Mylius' memoir on winds (1746), also presented to the Berlin competitions in which Daniel Bernoulli participated. The Bernoulli edition establishes an authoritative version of the source texts, starting from either the original publications or the manuscripts. The commentaries facilitate access to the historical texts for the modern reader by providing interpretative introductions, explanatory notes and indexes. All texts are printed in the original language (mainly Latin and French); the commentaries are in English.
Copius illustrations present figures from original printings as well as samples from holographs.