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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
With any twisted curve of order six is associated a system of planes, usually finite in number, which touch the curve at three distinct points. The curve with its system of tritangent planes possesses properties which recall the properties of a plane quartic curve and its system of bitangent lines; and this is specially true of the sextic which is the intersection of a cubic and a quadric surface. But whereas the properties of the plane curve were discovered by geometrical methods, such methods have only recently been applied with success to the space-curve; the earliest properties were obtained by Clebsch from his Theory of Abelian Functions. In the absence of any one place to which reference can conveniently be made, an account of these properties in their geometrical aspect will be useful.