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Updated: May 24, 2025
In numeration they proceed from one to ten, the number of fingers on both hands; and though they have for each number a different name, they generally take hold of their fingers one by one, shifting from one hand to the other, till they come to the number they want to express.
Like Rosalind's typical traveller, this worm has rich eyes and poor hands the former often ophthalmic, the latter always brown and wrinkled, and generally dirty. Life is too short to admit of repeated blunders in the numeration of beans, and this being his one weak point, the dram of ale does its work.
Captain Erskine, in his interesting "Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific," especially remarks upon the "avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" and he adds that "among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon only to five."
Not only are the first distinct ideas of number co-ordinate with ideas of likeness and equality, but the first efforts at numeration displayed the same relationship. On reading the accounts of various savage tribes, we find that the method of counting by the fingers, still followed by many children, is the aboriginal method.
Mr. Wolcott declares his opinion that the Confederation ought to be amended by substituting numbers of inhabitants as the rule; admits the difference between freemen and blacks; and suggests a compromise, by including in the numeration such blacks only as were within sixteen and sixty years of age. p. 331. TUESDAY, March 27, 1783. The eleventh and twelfth paragraphs: Mr. Mr.
"Nature has provided us with a kind of arithmetical instrument more generally used than is commonly imagined; I mean our fingers. Every thing inclines us to think, that these were the first instruments used by men to assist them in the practice of numeration. We may observe in Homer, that Proteus counts his sea-calves by fives and fives, that is, by his fingers.
For instance, the ivory disks of various colors which you see arranged upon the table as the pupils have left them serve very successfully to elucidate the arithmetical processes of numeration, addition, and subtraction; and the more intelligent children are taught to observe that the disks of varying colors are varyingly numbered white, 1; red, 5, and blue, 10 and so are encouraged to identify a concrete arbitrary figure with an abstract thought."
From the variety of the reports, uniformity of nomenclature and numeration is almost impossible. As we contemplate constantly increasing our data, we shall be glad to receive information of any unpublished anomalous or curious cases, either of the past or in the future.
'Here's so many noughts they dazzle my eyes, so they do, and put me in mind of all I suffered larning of my numeration table, when I was a boy at the day-school along with you, Jason units, tens, hundreds, tens of hundreds. Is the punch ready, Thady? says he, seeing me.
For that is plainly of itself some degree of probability; though uncertain and variable, according to the degrees of his experience and length of the accompt. Now as none will maintain, that our assurance in a long numeration exceeds probability, I may safely affirm, that there scarce is any proposition concerning numbers, of which we can have a fuller security.
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