Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/105

NUMBER STORIES For the same reason that Adriaen, going to school in Holland, was dividing by the old galley method, Michael Stifel (stē'fĕl), going to school in a little German town about the same time, also learned this same old-fashioned way, and so we see that Filippo’s new method, the one that we use to-day, was not known to boys living in Holland and Germany one or two centuries later.

HOW MICHAEL DIVIDED The division of 9552 by 12, from a work by Michael Stifel, printed about four hundred years ago

If you had lived when the Pilgrims came to America, you might all have learned division by the scratch method, because many people still used it then. Only a few years ago the Story-Teller found it still in use in Morocco, and the people who used it thought that it was better than ours. What do you think about it? 80