Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/99

NUMER STORIES our addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to-night Listen, then, to the story of the way in which Filippo (fḕ lēp'pō) and Adriaen (äd'rēän) and Michael (mī'kẳĕl) divided numbers.”

HOW FILIPPO DIVIDED MDCCXXVIII BY CXLIV He first wrote the numbers in modern figures. The rest of the work is quite different from ours

About the time that Christopher Columbus was born, a boy by the name of Filippo Calandri (kä län'drē) was going to school in a small Italian town. His teacher one day asked Filippo to write two numbers on a small board that he used for his arithmetic work, and he told him to write them in Roman numerals. The teacher then told him to divide the first of the numbers by the second, and of course Filippo could not do it; but 74