Some Curiosities of Modem Arithmetic.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 459, 2 April 1890, Page 3

Some Curiosities of Modem Arithmetic.

In an article on ‘ Misty Arithmetic,’ the ‘ Daily Graphic’ says : Savages are often hauled over the coals for their misty ideas of arithmetic, but we need not go so far as Australia or Timbuctoo for foggy counting. There is a good deal of arithmetic still extant, even among the civilised, which is of an extremely primitive character. One of the forms of primitive arithmetic still lingers around that palladium of our commercial prosperity, the British standard yard. For instance, you buy a penny reel of cotton * warranted 100 yards,’ and when you get home and unwind it, you find that it just stretches across the room. This gives you the remarkable result that your room is really 100 yards across, though you had never suspected it before, and your rent, which had always appeared high, is clearly shown to be a mere song. The fireplace, you now see, is at least 30yds wide, and your easy chair 20yds by 15; you have 12,000 cubic yards of piano, and 5 acres of writing desk, while even your waistcoat is some ten yard 3 in diameter, so that you find you are a man of much greater substance than you thought for. There certainly has been some primitive arithmetic somewhere to give this marvellous result; but whether it hangs round the cotton or your previous ideas of space you, of course, cannot determine. Primitive arithmetic also lingers about many of our ordinary operations. Take the building of a house, for example. Builders are men who can calculate with alacrity and cheerfulness; their readiness in figures, indeed, betokens a high stage of civilisation. Yet their calculations have usually the primitive element of being en tirely wrong. Before you build, your builder tells you, not only to a pound but to the odd farthing, what the house will cost, and be will, moreover, willingly bind himself to his figures by as many signatures bonds, and penalties as you like; bub when his bill conies in, it bears no perceivable relation whatever to the original estimate. That this is the result of an extremely primitive arithmetic is fully evidenced by the fact that it at once arouses all the ‘savage’ in you, and you feel that you could drink his gore at a draught. All his little errors of calculation he conceals under one comprehensive term, ‘extras.’ If you want more misty arithmetic, take your market-basket on your arm, and go shopping in a cheap neighbourhood on a. Saty?day.