Excerpt from The Teaching of Arithmetic
Of all the sciences, of all the subjects generally taught in the common schools, arithmetic is by far the oldest. Long before man had found for himself an alphabet, long before he first made rude ideographs upon wood or stone, he counted, he kept his tallies upon notched sticks, and he computed in some simple way by his fingers or by pebbles on the ground. He did not always count by tens as in our decimal system; indeed this was a rather late device, and one suggested by his digits. At first he was quite content to count to two, and generations later to three, and then to four. Then he repeated his threes and had what we call a scale of three, and then, as time went on, he used a scale of four, and then a scale of five. At one time he seems to have used the scale of twelve, because he found that twelve is divisible by more factors than ten, and particularly by two and three and four; but by the time he became ready to write his numbers the convenience of finger reckoning had become so generally recognized that ten became practically the universal radix. Nevertheless there remain in our language and customs numerous relics of the duodecimal idea, such as the number of inches in a foot, of ounces in a troy pound, and of pence in a shilling, all influenced by the Roman inclination to make much use of twelve in practical computation.
The writing of numbers has undergone more change than even the number names. Not only was there a notation for each language in ancient times, as to-day in the Orient, but some languages had several sets of numerals, as is seen in the three standard systems of Egypt, the two, of Greece, and the somewhat varied forms in use in Rome. The Roman supremacy gave the numerals of these people great influence in Europe, and they were practically in universal use in the West until the close of the Middle Ages.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Teaching of Arithmetic (Classic Reprint) (David Eugene Smith)