92 
its h’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 out in my mind as 
follows : — The inscription had evidently been cut by a very 
careful workman ; but at that time the 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 offered 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 “ f) ” 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 gene- 
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. Boethius, in the beginning of the 6th century, in the 
