the Elements; by others, that he had Theon's edition before him, and believed that only the theorems came from Euclid, while the proofs were supplied by Theon. The second book, as also other books on geometry attributed to Boethius, teaches, from numerical examples, the mensuration of plane figures after the fashion of the agrimensores.
A celebrated portion in the geometry of Boethius is that pertaining to an abacus, which he attributes to the Pythagoreans. A considerable improvement on the old abacus is there introduced. Pebbles are discarded, and apices (probably small cones) are used. Upon each of these apices is drawn a numeral giving it some value below 10. The names of these numerals are pure Arabic, or nearly so, but are added, apparently, by a later hand. These figures are obviously the parents of our modern "Arabic" numerals. The 0 is not mentioned by Boethius in the text. These numerals bear striking resemblance to the Gubar-numerals of the West-Arabs, which are admittedly of Indian origin. These facts have given rise to an endless controversy. Some contended that Pythagoras was in India, and from there brought the nine numerals to Greece, where the Pythagoreans used them secretly. This hypothesis has been generally abandoned, for it is not certain that Pythagoras or any disciple of his ever was in India, nor is there any evidence in any Greek author, that the apices were known to the Greeks, or that numeral signs of any sort were used by them with the abacus. It is improbable, moreover, that the Indian signs, from which the apices are derived, are so old as the time of Pythagoras. A second theory is that the Geometry attributed to Boethius is a forgery; that it is not older than the tenth, or possibly the ninth, century, and that the apices are derived from the Arabs. This theory is based on contradictions between passages in the Arithmetica and others in the Geometry. But
