Book Description

Excerpt from The American Journal of Education, 1862, Vol. 12 A knowledge of Arithmetic is indispensable to every one. The mer chant, the workman, the engineer, all need to know how to calculate with rapidity and precision. The useful character of arithmetic indi cates that its methods should admit of great simplicity, and that its teaching should be most carefully freed from all needless complication. When we enter into the spirit of the methods of arithmetic, we perceive that they all fiow clearly and simply from the very principles of numer ation, from some precise definitions, and fi'om certain ideas of relations between numbers, which all minds easily perceive, and which they even possessed in advance, before their teacher made them recognize them and taught them to class them in a methodical and fruitful order. We therefore believe that there is no one who is not capable of receiving, of understanding, and of enjoying well-arranged and well-digested arith metical instruction. But the great majority of those who have received a liberal education do not possess this useful knowledge. Their minds, they say, are not suited to the study of mathematics. They have found it impossible to bend themselves to the study of those abstract sciences whose barrenness and dryness form so striking a contrast to the attractions of history, and the beauties of style and of thought in the great poets; and so on. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.