PREFACE xi 



of financial statements. The farmer, after keeping his 

 own accounts, is able to find from the simple Loss and 

 Gain account and the simple Statement of Resources and 

 Liabilities, all the facts desired from financial statements. 

 Any further analytical results can be prepared in the form 

 of special analytical or statistical tables. In a commer- 

 cial business, the financial statements occupy a more promi- 

 nent place because they are largely for the use of people 

 financially interested but who are not familiar with the 

 daily transactions and the accounts. Such people need 

 more elaborate statements in order to assist them in form- 

 ing opinions as to the progress and condition of the busi- 

 ness. 



From a pedagogical viewpoint the principles of com- 

 parison and correlation used in the development of prin- 

 ciples herein should prove quite helpful. 



In all cases where there are two or more methods of per- 

 forming a certain process the illustrations of these methods 

 employ the same set of data. In this way it is plainly 

 brought out that any differences in results, or form of re- 

 sults, are caused by the difference in method rather than 

 the difference in data. The author recently had occasion 

 to examine a text on commercial arithmetic. It was no- 

 ticed in the discussion of two ways of calculating interest 

 that one set of data was used in illustrating one method 

 and another set in illustrating the other method. As a 

 result, the student trying to absorb the principles for the 

 first time, very probably would not know whether the dif- 

 ference in results was caused by the difference in method 

 or in the original data. 



