Thomas Beddoes to Maria Thompson, [?1803] (9)
Since you give me so much encouragement, I will certainly have the pleasure of writing to you again, my dear, on our return. I should know much better what to say, if you would have the goodness to mention to me as particularly as you can, those reflections and feelings which strike you, when occupied by any of those subjects, to which I may have induced you to pay attention. Perhaps Condorcet may furnish little scope for any matter of this kind. The most curious thing, and what alone can make the elements of arithmetic interesting to a person who is not incited to study them by any of the ordinary motives, is to consider how people advanced this art from actually counting things in nature, to its present expedition. This is not so difficult to come at, when one sees distinctly what those operations were, of which the figures we now use are the symbols. After a certain period, it seems that many nations fived the objects they had to number. Thus Homer, I think, makes Proteus five his sea-calves. Then, the fingers of the two hands making ten, a notch was cut, or a stroke made by some coloured body. This was the origin, and most difficult step in decimal numeration. If men had had any objects capable of placing before their eyes some other number, as familiarly as their fingers place ten, the figures towards the right hand would have had a different value: for as they went from the five fingers of one hand to the ten of both, so some nations made advances towards doubling ten. Hence a score means twenty; but no system of numeration was ever founded upon this. The Greeks and Latins I think, are without any word for twenty corresponding to our score. Therefore it was never much a custom with them to consider twenty as an unit, and draw a score for every twenty in counting. It is quite an odd thing we should have a separate word for twelve. I do not recollect hearing what may have been the natural cause for the term a dozen. It can hardly have been the ten fingers and two legs; for they cannot be made into a groupe, as the fingers of one or both hands so easily can. In some languages I should think, there must be a second term for five, in consequence of considering the figures collectively; but upon the succession of the decimal numeration, this term was lost in many.
Published: Stock, pp. 293–95