Elementary arithmetic, with brief notices of its history... by Robert Potts.

18

LNTRODUCTION.

there more cultivated than in England. At Florence, Venice, and
other cities of Italy, both literature and the arts flourished in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the science of the arithmetic
of commerce was both cultivated and improved by their extensive trade
with other countries. He wrote a treatise on the Astrolabe in English
for the use of his son. This is the earliest treatise in the English
language written on any scientific subject. It has lately been edited
by Mr. Skeat, of Christ's College, to which he has prefixed a very
interesting preface. In pages xliii.-xlvi. will be found a table' of the
fixed stars, copied from a manuscript which bears the date of 1223 in
the Arabian characters, a date prior to that of Petrarch by more than
a century. The character of the writing, however, is very much like
that of manuscripts written in the fourteenth century. If these characters are really copied as written in the original manuscript, they constitute the earliest date as yet discovered in these characters.
They do not appear in the dates of the works of Caxton. In
"The Myrrour or Ymage of the World," however, printed in 1480,
where, treating of Arsmetryke, or Algorithm, among other sciences, he
has given a woodcut of an arithmetician sitting before a desk, on
which are tablets or papers marked with the nine figures. At St.
Albans "The Myrrour of the World" was reprinted in 1506, in which
the Arabic figures appear under the forms now in use.
The ancient calendars of the fourteenth and the early part of the
fifteenth centuries, written before the invention of printing, supply
some evidence of the manner in which a knowledge of the Arabic notation was generally made known both in England and in the countries
of Europe.2 Copies of these calendars are found in almost all the
1 Tabula stellarum fixarum que ponuntur in Astrolabio certificata ad civitatem
parisius cuius latitudo est 48 gradus et 30 minuta. In anno domini nostri Iesu
Christi 1223."-Pref. p. xliii.-[MIS. Camb. Univ. Lib. HEh., 6. 8, fol. 236.]
2 In Archbishop Parker's manuscript library, preserved in Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, there is a table of eclipses from 1330 to 1340, to which is subjoined a
table, in three columns, containing the Roman and Arabic numerals, and another
nearly the same as the Roman, but the characters different. The following explanation is subjoined:-" Omnis numerus vel omnis figura in algorismo primo loco
se ipsum significat; secundo loco, decies se ipsum significat; tertio loco, centies
se; quarto loco, milesies se; quinto loco, decies milesies se; sexto loco, centies
milesies se; septiino loco, mille milesies se; octavo loco, decies mille milesies se;
nono loco, centies mille milesies se; decimo loco, mille milesies milesies se. Et sic
niultiplicando per decem centum et mille usque in infinitum computando versus
sinistram."
The calendar of John Somers, of Oxford, written in 1380, was one of the most
popular of the time, and the copies in general have this addition:-" Tabula docens
algorismum legere, cujus utilitas est in brevi satis rpatio numerum magnum comprehendere. Et quin numeri in Kalendario positi vix excedunt sexaginta, ultra
illam summam non est protensa." There is a copy of this calendar in the British
Museum, and several English translations among the manuscripts in the Ashmolean
Library at Oxford.
Mr. Halliwell states in his " Rara Mathematica," that, in the year 1812, a small
octavo volume was published at Hackney, containing an account of an almanack
for the year 1386, probably one of the oldest in English. At this time the Indian
notation appears to have been imperfectly understood, if one may judge from the
nixture of Roman and Indian notations in numbers consisting of more than two
figures; as 52,220 is written thus-52 McO 20.
There is a calendar preserved in the British Museum of about the date of 1403,
which contains the numerals in the form they usually appear before the end of the
fifteenth century.
There is another described in the "Archmeologia," vol. xiii., p. 153, which