A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tian science. Yet another illustration of this is fur- 

 nished us if we turn to the more abstract departments 

 of thought and inquire what were the Egyptian at- 

 tempts in such a field as mathematics. The answer 

 does not tend greatly to increase our admiration for 

 the Egyptian mind. We are led to see, indeed, that 

 the Egyptian merchant was able to perform all the 

 computations necessary to his craft, but we are forced 

 to conclude that the knowledge of numbers scarcely 

 extended beyond this, and that even here the methods 

 of reckoning were tedious and cumbersome. Our 

 knowledge of the subject rests largely upon the so- 

 called papyrus Rhind, 10 which is a sort of mythological 

 hand-book of the ancient Egyptians. Analyzing this 

 document, Professor Erman concludes that the knowl- 

 edge of the Egyptians was adequate to all practical 

 requirements. Their mathematics taught them " how 

 in the exchange of bread for beer the respective value 

 was to be determined when converted into a quantity 

 of corn ; how to reckon the size of a field ; how to deter- 

 mine how a given quantity of corn would go into a 

 granary of a certain size," and like e very-day prob- 

 lems. Yet they were obliged to make some of their 

 simple computations in a very roundabout way. It 

 would appear, for example, that their mental arith- 

 metic did not enable them to multiply by a number 

 larger than two, and that they did not reach a clear 

 conception of complex fractional numbers. They did, 

 indeed, recognize that each part of an object divided 

 into 10 pieces became ^ of that object; they even 

 grasped the idea of |, this being a conception easily 

 visualized ; but they apparently did not visualize such 



52 



