Chase and Mirth[2] define a circuit in a linkage as "all possible orientations of the links that can be realized without disconnecting any of the joints" and a branch as "a continuous series of positions of the mechanism on a circuit between two stationary con-
figurations .... The stationary configurations divide a circuit into a series of branches." A linkage may have one or more circuits each of which may contain one or more branch-es. The number of circuits corresponds to the number of solutions possible from the
position equations for the linkage.