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the bad effects that had ensued from it. He impresses on the mind of his nominal scholar that "as without the art of numbering a man can do almost nothing, so with the help he may attain to all things." He expatiates "how much it will profit towards the acquisition of all the sciences," and urges "how necessary it is in every profession and every employment." He particularises "music, physic, lawe, Grammar, philosophy, divinitie, the armie," and sets forth "in how many ways it is conducible for all private weales, for lords and all possessioners, for merchants and all other occupiers, and generally for all estates of men." After mewing its importance in Grammar, and in philosophy, he thus quotes the authorities of Aristotle and Plato: "It is the faying of Aristotle, that hee that is ignorant of Arithmeticke, is meet for no science. And Plato, his master, wrote a little sentence over his school-house door, Let none enter in hither (quoth he) that is ignorant of Geometry. Seeing hee would have all his scholars expert in Geometry, much rather hee would have the same in Arithmeticke, without which Geometry cannot stand^[1]."

When William of Wykeham formed his two noble seminaries on a truly original plan, which was, as it is observed by his most respectable biographer^[2], to train the members of them from the lowest class of Grammar learning to the highest degree of the several faculties, it was not to be expected that he should make Arithmetick a primary article. Arithmetick was then ranged in one of the higher classes of science, and with Latin numerals was hardly attainable by a stripling at a Grammar school. The working of a sum in the Rule of Three, if that were one of the calculating suppositions then proposed, would have long puzzled the

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