AN ALGEBRAIC ARITHMETIC BEING AN EXPOSITION OF THE THEORY ADVANCED ARITHMETIC BASED ON THE ALGEBRAIC EQUATION BY S. E. COLEMAN, B.S. WILLIAM WHITING FELLOW AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith PREFACE THIS arithmetic is not offered to the public as a refinement or super-refinement of the methods of existing textbooks on the subject. It is a new departure. For a number of years arithmetics have been undergoing a progressive change. Voluminous works, in which the isolated treatment of related topics and the multiplicity of detail relating to business arithmetic completely obscured the unity of the science, have by degrees given place to more compendious works. The change has, however, been little more than a process of successive elimination. To the former plethora has succeeded an ever-increasing leanness, until at last the skeleton of the subject stands revealed indeed, for it alone remains. The arithmetic of to-day is merely a compilation of examples, classified and miscellaneous, with illustrative solutions accompanied by brief explanatory notes and a few definitions. The task of infusing a living, rational principle into these dry bones is left entirely to the teacher. A second change in the mathematics of the grammar school, contemporaneous with that above mentioned, has been the introduction of elementary geometry and, more recently, of elementary algebra. The situation is best described by saying that the latter subjects have partially 17:093 |