Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/26

OF LONG AGO hot, and where people did not wear shoes, they counted their toes as well as their fingers, learning separate number names to twenty, — not “one and ten,” “two and ten,“ and “three-ten” (thir-teen), but “eleven,” “twelve,” and so on, with special names, to twenty, which they sometimes called “man finished,” and beyond that they counted by twenties. Some of these people wandered to other countries and carried along with them their way of counting. But most of the people of the world did as the children of Ching and An-am and Menes did, — they counted by tens. When we hear of “three-score years and ten,” and when the French speak of “four twenties” instead of eighty, we have two remaining bits of the old way of counting by twenties.

Thus the world learned from Ching and An-am and Menes, and from their children and their children’s children, and so on for hundreds and hundreds of years, first to count by twos or threes, and then by fives, and then by tens, and sometimes by twenties. A few people tried to count by twelves, and so we have twelve inches in a foot, twelve