1«87.] d-jJ [Taylor. 



The word/owr will give us " fo ;" but for five, in order to avoid a conso- 

 nant recurrence, we shall have to resort to the original Sanscrit, pancha, 

 which will give us " pa." Our six will give us "si" or " se ;" but for 

 our next number, as we can derive no satisfactory help from English or 

 Latin, Greek or Sanscrit, we arc driven to some arl)itrary syllable. As 

 seven is the last of our series, we may accept the single independent term 

 with less reluctance ; and that its sound may be as distinctively marked 

 as possible, let us call it " ki." 



Here, then, we have assigned for each of the numerals "a local habita- 

 tion and a name." 



L U,i; C D't; 6 The; P i^o; P Pa ; ^ Se ; ^ Ki. 



Our decades — twenty, thirty, forty — offer us the very suitable and sim- 

 ple sufhx " ty " to designate our octades. Our hundred suggests the syl- 

 lable "der" as a convenient designation of the third place of figures ; and 

 our thousand will give us "sen." And here we may improve upon our 

 present mode of expressing "places " by employing these distinctive suf- 

 fixes as independent nouns, significant of a particular order of units, with- 

 out reference to any special or intrinsic value. Thus a simple unit would 

 indicate any figure occupying the first place ; a Ty would indicate any 

 figure occupying the second place ; a Der any figure occupying the third 

 place, etc. 



But mindful of that prudent law — "economy of means " — and not to 

 burden our infant scheme with too great a load of unfamiliar nomencla- 

 ture (always the greatest obstacle to the reception of any novel system), 

 let us resort to combinations of these simple suffixes, instead of applying 

 a new term to each new place of figures. By this means we shall be re- 

 quired to introduce new terms only at the successive and advancing pow- 

 ers of each great unit. Thus using "Ty" for the second place, and 

 " Der " for the third place, we may very well employ the word " Ty-der " 

 for the fourth place, "Sen" for the fifth place, " Ty-sen " for the sixth 

 place, " Der-sen " for the seventh place, and " Ty-der-sen " for the eighth 

 place. Here is a pause ; and to do honor to the number eight, this should 

 comprise one independent period of figures ; to be followed by a new 

 term, the analogue of our JMillion.* We cannot derive a convenient suf- 

 fix, however, from this term ; we shall therefore have to coin a new one. 

 Let us call our great figure Kaly. We have thus the progression : One 

 "Ty " squared is one " Der ;" one " Der " squared is one "Sen ;" one 

 "Sen" squared is one "Kaly ," the intermediate places being expressed 

 by the obvious compounds of these words. Or to illustrate the series pro- 

 posed by our own decimal terms, it is as though having assigned eight places 



*0\\T Million, the square of the Roman Mille, is a comparatively modern word; and 

 useful as it is now universally esteemed, it appears on its first introduction to have met 

 with but little favor. "Bishop Tonstall, wlio has discussed at great length the Latin 

 nomenclature of numbers, speaks of the term miUion as in common use, but he rejects it 

 as barbarous" (Peacock's Arithmetic). 



PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXIV. 12G. 2p. PRINTED DEC. 5, 1887. 



