Page:A history of Japanese mathematics (IA historyofjapanes00smitiala).pdf/18

6 convinced that there must have been a considerable intercourse of scholars at an early date.

Of the rest of Japanese mathematics in this early period we are wholly ignorant, save that we know a little of the ancient system of measures and that a calendar existed. How the merchants computed, whether the almost universal finger computation of ancient peoples had found its way so far to the East, what was known in the way of mensuration, how much of a crude primitive observation of the movements of the stars was carried on, what part was played by the priest in the orientation of shrines and temples, what was the mystic significance of certain numbers, what, if anything, was done in the recording of numbers by knotted cords, or in representing them by symbols,—all these things are looked for in the study of any primitive mathematics, but they are looked for in vain in the evidences thus far at hand with respect to the earliest period of Japanese history, It is to be hoped that the spirit of investigation that is now so manifest in Japan will result in throwing more light upon this interesting period in which mathematics took its first root upon Japanese soil.