Book Description

Excerpt from Pelicotetics or the Science of Quantity, an Elementary Treatise on Algebra and Its Groundwork, Arithmetic This book seeks to make Arithmetic and Algebra a science, a piece of knowledge to wit everywhere reasoned out in an orderly way from principles expressly laid down and toward that end has to run wide of the track of the common books. In the arithmetic of whole numbers these books at starting are so altogether taken up with numerical notation and notational processes as with the help of sundry ellipses and ambiguities of language to becloud the first notion of pure number and to miss the operations that are the very heart and life of arithmetic's every part that therefore abide ever the same under all systems of nota tion and that therefore before aught else have a right to the name of arithmetical operations. Yet the notation itself marks numbers only as results of certain of those Operations and so can only be understood by knowing what the operations are. Besides the pro perties of, and the' processes that have to do with, the notation spring wholly from, and so can only be known through, the laws of the operations. Hence the notation's exact meaning is mistaken the processes themselves are not made out and of the operational laws the more striking alone get any handling whatever though of the roughest kind while the rest are deemed unworthy of even so much as the barest hint. 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.