92 



its li's, and at once this gave me the clue to the Eccleston 

 date, the whole difficulty of which had lain in the very 

 careful " fj " which formed the second figure. I turned to 

 my copy of it and saw at a glance that it was in reality 

 1536. 



The explanation of it I worked oat in my mind as 

 follows : — The inscription had evidently been cut by a very 

 careful workman ; but at that time tlie Arabic numerals 

 were hardly known except to scholars, and all the associa- 

 tions that ordinary people had with figures were with 

 letters used as numerals. Hence workmen tried to make 

 the figure oflfered to them like the nearest letter they could 

 find. So the workman at Eccleston, instead of imitating 

 what seemed to him the rude h of his copy, made a 

 beautiful " t) " of the period ! And the same with the 3, 

 which would be to him evidently a rough attempt at a Z ; 

 and with the 6, which, looking like an inverted e, he judi- 

 ciously put what he considered the right side up. My 

 perplexity, however, and especially the solution of it, drew 

 my attention to the question of how long ago the Arabic 

 numerals were introduced, and of the source from which 

 they came to us. 



Until latterly it has been generally believed that our 

 system of decimal notation came to us from the Arabs, and 

 hence the name Arabic numerals. It is now however 2rene- 

 rally admitted that they are originally Indian. Two lines 

 of possible derivation from India have been traced out, each 

 of which has been regarded as that by which their use was 

 actually introduced into Europe. One is through the Moors, 

 It is known that the present system of arithmetic was intro- 

 duced from India into Persia at the end of the 8th century. 

 Hence it passed into use in the north-east of Africa about the 

 end of the 10th century, and with the Moors it would un- 

 doubtedly come into Spain. The other line is through the 

 Latins. Boetliius, in the beginning of the 6th century, in the 



