In quickly looking through the copy [of Alfred Marshall's Principles] I have on my shelf, I found supply-and-demand graphs in footnotes, but none in the main text.
It's well-known (isn't it?) that in the History of Economic Thought, the movement from classicism to neoclassicism - from Marshall to Samuelson - that narrative (words) and graphs/equations (math) "swapped". Marshall used footnotes to provide representations of the theory; Samuelson used footnotes to provide explanations for the math.
See also Art Diamond:
Take everything nonessential, and move it into footnotes. Then collect all the footnotes into an appendix. Finally, delete the appendix.
But...
It was typical of Schumpeter's love for theory that he rejected Marshall's view that the reader could skip the footnotes and appendixes. If time were short, Schumpeter advised, read them and skip the text! (p. 7; italics in original.)
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