HISTORY

or

INVENTIONS & DISCOVERIES.

A.BACUS. The necessity of some method for facilitatingmercantile computations must have been experienced in a veryearly period, and accordingly we find that long before eithernumeral letters or figures were known, a plain board ortable divided into squares, each of which was of a differentnumerical value, was resorted to for this purpose : and re-ceived the name of Abacus from Pythagoras , the supposedinventor of it, about 550 B. C. A similar practice wasadopted by the Chinese and Indians; and also by theRomans till the dissolution of their empire, from whichperiod this mode of calculation was lost in Italy till thetenth century; when Malmsbury states it was revived byPope John XV. , who had made himself acquainted with theuse of the Abacus , from the Saracens in Spain .

That the English were early acquainted with a knowledgeof arithmetic, is proved from a treatise having been writtenupon that science by Aldhelm , bishop of Sherborne , wholived in the seventh century, and it is not improbable that themethod of computation by the Abacus was introduced intothis country by the Romans. So late as towards the close of

B