Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/73

NUMBER STORIES Number Stories, p50-illustration.png GREEK WAX TABLET This tablet was used by a Greek schoolboy early in the Christian era. The boy wrote part of the multiplication table upon it, and it can still be read. It is now in the British Museum Besides using pebbles, as he sometimes did and as was usually done in earlier times, Caius also used small circular disks like our checkers or button molds, and these he called calculi (kăl'kṹ lē), which is the plural of calculus. When he and the other boys went to school they did not carry notebooks, for paper was unknown, nor did they carry slates; but they sometimes carried small boards covered with wax, and on this wax they wrote with 50