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Essays on Archaeological Subjects; And on Various Questions Connected With the History of Art, Science and Literature in the Middle Ages
Essays on Archaeological Subjects And on Various Questions Connected With the History of Art Science and Literature in the Middle Ages Author:Thomas Wright General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1861 Original Publisher: J. R. Smith Subjects: Literature Great Britain History / Europe / Great Britain History / Medieval Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Medieval Social Science / Archaeology Notes: This is... more » a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: XV. ON THE ABACUS, OR MEDIEVAL SYSTEM OF ARITHMETIC. N the mathematical treatises of the ancients, the results of abstruse arithmetical calculations are given, without any'indication of the exact process by which they were obtained. The operations of arithmetic taught and practised in the schools, being perhaps of a kind not easily expressed in writing, have perished with the schools themselves. It is self-evident that arithmetical operations of any extent could not be performed with the clumsy notation of the Greek or Roman numerals. The somewhat varied writings of Boethius, who flourished at the beginning of the sixth century, were the channel through which chiefly the science and philosophy of the ancients passed to the middle ages, previous to the introduction of Arabian science in the twelfth century. A very obscure passage, at the end of the first book of the Geometrica of this writer, describes a tabular system of arithmeticalcalculation, to which he gives the name of abacus, and he states that it was said to have been invented by the Pythagoricians, whence it was also called the mensa Pythagorica. The first of these names reminds us forcibly of the lines of Persius the satirist, -- Nee qui abaco numeros et secto in pulvere metas Scit risisse vafer. But so little has the passage in Boethius been understood in latter times, that his edito...« less