TITLE: Vandermonde's remarkably clever notation for determinants
QUESTION [21 upvotes]: The entry on Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde at the MacTutor History 
of Mathematics archive ends with the description of the contents of Vandermonde's fourth and last mathematical paper, concluding with the sentence 

Finally he gave a remarkably clever notation for determinants which has not survived.

Sadly, it does not tell us what this remarkably clever notation was! I've searched a bit for the actual paper, Mémoire sur l'élimination, with no success.
Maybe someone knows what this notation was?

REPLY [26 votes]: The history of the Vandermonde notation is described, in the context of the Vandermonde determinant, in section 2.1 of A case of mathematical eponymy: the Vandermonde determinant (2010). It seems Lebesgue didn't like it because it could have induced a mix-up between indices and exponents, and that may be a reason it did not survive. Leibniz used a similar notation.

The following quotation from his 1772 paper shows how Vandermonde used this positional notation for coefficients to construct determinants:

Here is the original in French, from Mémoire sur l'Élimination, M. Vandermonde, Histoire de L'Academie Royale des Sciences, 1772, part two, pages 516-532.