344 ANNUAL REGISTER, 1758,
Throws his ftei-p flight in many an aery wheel Two Spondees, one Pyrrhic, one Trochee,
Dr-jw aftjf him thz third part of heav'n's h5ft Two Trochees, one Pyrrhic, one Spondee,
Profp!rous or ^dverfe, so (halt thoii lead And many other varieties needlefs to note.
1 1.
from the Gentleman' s Magazine.
Staffordjhire, Sept. 24, 1757.
THE Roman numerals, though faund to be greatly inferior in point of utility to ;he Arabic cha- rafters, by which all operations in arithmetic are now ufually perform- ed, aie yet retained in ufe in tome calcs; but I much quelliun, whether it be generally known, or at lead agreed upon, how they criginally received their value. — T h:' realbn why M and C iliould fignify the one a hundred,and the other a thoufand, is very obvious, they being the ini- tial letter- o{ MiUe and Centum. But ^vhy does D Hand for five hundred, L for fifty, X for ten, and V. for iive .' the folucion of this difficulty, to me appears to be this; the old antique way of writing the letter M was thus.
m
or rather th
...CO
which being cut in two in the mid- dle, by a perpendicular line, leaves two D's, each of which exprtfles juft half the value of M. The like reaibning will hold good in regard
to the letter L, for if the I be
horizontally difieded, the lower part makes an L, two of which are equal to C - A- to the Jeuer V, J tnink it may be accounted for thus ; the words ^uinque, quifquis, quonium, and many others, begin-
ning with q, were anciently writ- ten with C, as may be feen in the old copies of Plautus, and other authors ; now as they had already made ufe of C to reprefent a hun- dred, i; could not again be ufed here, therefore ii i^ probable they took the next letter, which hap- pens to be U, or V, as it was for-^ merly written. This being admit- ted, the X may be eafily made out, by joining the V'i tog'ther, the pofition of the lower being only inverted. Thefe, Mr. Urban, are my corjecftores upon this fub- jeft ; if you think they have any degree of probability in them, or may excite others to give ub a better rationale, you are at liberty to make ule of them as you think proper.
Philarithmusi
Mr. Urban,
YOUR correfpondent, Phila- rithmus, has endeavoured to fnew how the Roman numeral let- ters received their value ; and tho' his hypothefis is ingenious, yet I think I can (hew that he is radically miiiaken, by proving, thcit there is great reafon to believe the Romans never exprtlled any num- bers by lettrrs, e>.cept as the cha- ra£lers which they ufed to exprefs numbers, became le:ters by acci- . dent.
In the firTi place, however, I am ready to ackno^^ledge, that the Greeks, and oiker eaikrn nations,
did
