This article studies the corpus of the papers published in Mathematische Annalen between 1869 and 1898, and dealing with the theory of algebraic surfaces. We tackle this subject with the help of textometry, a method for analyzing corpuses of texts by focusing on their lexicon and grammar. The avenues that are explored include the study of co-occurrences of chosen terms, of grammatical specificities, and of classes of texts given by an algorithm of lexical classification, which are confronted with the clusters of texts obtained by looking at the corpus from the viewpoint of networks of citations.