Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/25

NUMBER STORIES the world was growing old, while to us it seems to have been very young.

Hundreds of years again went by, and still new Chings and An-ams and Meneses played in the forests of Yu, or on the plains of Mesopotamia, or on the banks of the Nile; but now the world began to feel that “five fives and four” was not large enough, even in ancient Egypt. Then it was that someone thought that if people could count to five on one hand, they might as well count to ten on two hands, and so the Ching and An-am and Menes of that day counted the trees and sheep by learning number names to ten, and then saying “one and ten, two and ten, three and ten,” and so on to “ten tens, ten tens and one,” and as much farther as they wished to go. The world had discovered that its ten fingers were useful in counting, and so it learned to count by tens; and this was one of the greatest discoveries that the world ever made. Although boys and girls speak different languages, they all have ten fingers, and so all civilized people to-day count by tens.

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