CHAPTER IX. Statement and Criticism of the Old Doctrines.

Nature herself has supplied man with the simplest and most convenient of counters in his ten fingers. Hence naturally arises a preference amongst primitive peoples for counting by tens, and this method, although it has at times been supplanted partially (seldom altogether) by the duodecimal and sexagesimal systems, which are superior by possessing a greater number of submultiples than the decimal (e.g. 12 = 6 × 2, 4 × 3, whilst 10 = 5 × 2 only), was adhered to by the Egyptians all through their history down to the latest Pharaohs. It may then perhaps be argued that it was through Egyptian influence with Greece that a large part of Greece adopted for their silver a standard based on the decimal system, especially as certain traces of Egyptian influence in very early times have been discovered of late. But as I have already pointed out above when discussing the theory of an Egyptian origin for the Aeginetan standard, because standards of like weight are found in two different regions, it by no means follows that one has borrowed from the other. If we can point out that in both Egypt and Greece there was a standard for gold almost identical in weight, it is at once apparent that there was no need for the Greeks to borrow from the Egyptians the idea of making ten silver ingots or wedges equal to one gold; especially as the decimal idea was next to that of five the simplest and most rudimentary form of calculation known to mankind. It is certainly preposterous to suppose that the Greeks were too barbarous at the time when they had attained a knowledge of silver to devise such a simple process as that of taking the fifteen ingots of silver, which from the natural laws of supply and demand they regarded as the equivalent of one gold ingot of like weight, and redividing them into ten new ingots of silver. This surely will not seem an incredible feat for the early Hellenes to perform when we recall to mind the extraordinary skill in arithmetic which is found among some barbarous peoples. “In West Africa a lively and continual habit of bargaining has developed a great power of arithmetic, and little children already do feats of computation with their heaps of cowries³⁹.” To imagine that the Greeks could not perform so simple a feat as that which I propose