Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/126

 a fragment of a Donatus written in Scotch, which has been hypothetically placed as early as 1508.

Of mathematics and science, the subjects that form the backbone of a “modern side” curriculum, only the first was in a sufficiently advanced state to be even given consideration as a subject of school instruction, and it is improbable that boys were taught more than the barest elements. Indeed there appears to have been a considerable amount of prejudice against mathematics as a means towards general culture. “Mark all mathematical heads, which be only and wholely bent to those sciences,” writes Ascham in the Scholemaster, “how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unable to serve in the world.” Many educationists, however, were not of this opinion, and efforts were made by the more farseeing among them to render the study of numbers more accessible to the beginner. In 1522 Cuthbert Tonstall, afterwards Bishop of London, published his Arithmetic De arte supputandi. Written for boys (Tonstall suggests that it may be of use to Sir Thomas More’s sons), it is very practical, and well suited for school use, and was far ahead of anything else that had been written on the subject. Sturm thought so highly of it that he brought out a reprint at Strasburg in 1544, and in his preface assured the public that the book was the best in the market, and that any student who mastered it would know all that was to be known on the subject.

It must be confessed that in the sixteenth century the advocates of arithmetic a study laid more stress on its