brightest Wykehamist in the upper form. Of this circumstance the founder must have been apprized, as it may be fairly presumed that he was an expert Geometrician; and whilst improving himself in the art of Numbering, he might repeatedly have found cause to make the same complaint which the ingenious Aldhelm did to Hedda, a prelate of his see, that the long and intricate calculations bore so grievously upon him as to make him almost desperate, and that the labour he had bestowed on the other branches of learning he had attained was trifling in comparison[1]. This will sufficiently account for Wykeham's not ingrafting Arithmetick on Grammar in his school at Winchester; and as Henry VI. was, at Eton and Cambridge, a strict copier of Wykeham's plan, and as Arithmetick was then a science of immense labour from the limited use of the Arabic numerals, it was an elementary mode of instruction that would have been then premature.
But in the sixteenth century the case was materially altered. Of the power and the convenience of Arabic numerals there could not have been then a doubt, though they were but little used in consequence of a pertinacious adherence to an old habit. Early in that century, if not in the fifteenth, a book in English was certainly published to teach the manner of accounting by cyphers; and in 1543 there was a schoolmaster in London who taught to keep accounts after a book of his own compiling. The "Pathwaie" to the art of numbering being thus rendered smooth and facile, it must appear strange that in two schools instituted for the
- ↑ Anglia Sacra, V. XI. ,p. 7, De vita Aldhelmi.
"De ratione vero calculations quid commemorandum; cum tantæ supputationis imminens desperatio colla mentis oppresserit; ut omnem præteritum lectionis laborem parvi penderem, cujus me pridem secreta cubicula nosse credideram; et ut sententia beati Hieronymi, dum se occasio obtulit, utar, Qui mihi prius vldebar Sciolus,(illegible text) cæpi esse discipulus; sic quod tandem superna gratia fretus, difficilima rerum argumenta et calculi suppositiones, quas partes numeri appellant, lectionis instantia reperi."
improvement
