Devon Notes and Queries.
I. George Parker Bidder. — George Parker Bidder, the famous " calculating boy," was born in Moreton Hampstead in 1806, died in 1878, and was buried at Stoke Fleming. The following paragraph relating to him is transcribed from A Book of Recollections, by the late J. C. Jeafireson (1894), and is of interest for bis own explanation of the method he adopted in executing bis remarkable feats in mental arithmetic, and which be performed with surprising rapidity :—
" In his sixty-first year, Mr. Bidder told me that he should be happy to multiply four figures by four figures for my entertainment, as he could do so without distressing his brain, but that be bad for some time refrained from performing any more difficult feat of mental calculation, because it pained him to multiply in his mind five figures by five figures. At the same time, to give me some notion of the process by "which be dealt with figures in mental arithmetic, he told me that he worked the two sets of figures from left to right, i.e., that in multiplying four figures by four figures, (say 9876 by J432,) he multiplied the 9 thousands by the 5 thousands, and put the result in millions by itself, then multiplied the 8 hundreds by the 4 hundreds, putting the result by itself, and then dealt m like manner with the 70 and 30, and the 6 and a. He said that after doing the four sums of multiplication, be saw the four results lying before his mind's eye, each of them lying in regular form like a pile of shot. He then added the
Jesuits together, beginning with the two smallest sums, then
