Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/27

NUMBER STORIES ounces in the ancient pound, and twelve things in a dozen, but the reason why the world came to count by tens was because Ching and An-am and Menes and you and I have just ten fingers on our two hands.

Number Stories, p10-illustration.png REPRESENTING NUMBERS BY THE HAND From a book printed nearly four hundred years ago. It shows the way in which numbers were represented by the hand

Long after the early days of which we have been speaking, the world learned how to write numbers. Because different races wrote them in different ways, the merchants who traded with others whose language they did not speak represented numbers by their