ed; indeed, most persons are both
surprised and offended, when they hear it declared to be a purely
artificial base, proper only to abstract numbers.

The binary base, on the contrary, is natural, real, simple,
and accords with the tendency of the mind to simplify, to
individualize. In business, who ever thinks of a half as
two-fourths, or three-sixths, much less as two-and-a-half-fifths,
or three-and-a-half-sevenths? For division by two produces a half
at one operation; but with any other divisor, the reduction is too
great, and must be followed by multiplication. Think of calling
a half five-tenths, a quarter twenty-five-hundredths, an eighth
one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousandths! Arithmetic is seldom used as a
plaything. It generally comes into use when the mind is too much
occupied for sporting. Consequently, the smallest divisor that will
serve the purpose is always preferred. A calculation is an appendage to
a mercantile transaction, not a part of the transaction itself; it is,
indeed, a hindrance, and in large business is performed by a distinct
person. But even with him, simplicity, because necessary to speed, is
second in merit only to correctness.

The binary base is not only simple, it is real. Accordingly, it has
large agreement with the popular divisions of weights, etc. Grocers'
weights, up to the four-pound piece, and all their measures, are binary;
so are the divisions of the yard, the inch, etc.

It is not only simple and real, it is natural. On every hand, things may
be found that are duplex in form, that associate in pairs, that separate
into halves, that may be divided into two equal parts. Things are
continually sold in pairs, in halves, and in quantities produced by
halving.

The binary base, therefore, is here proposed, as the only proper base
for gradation; and the octonal, as the true commercial base, for
numeration and notation: two bases which in combination form a
binoctonal system that is at once simple, comprehensive, and efficient.

MY LAST LOVE.

I had counted many more in my girlhood, in the first flush of
blossoming,--and a few, good men and true, whom I never meet even now
without an added color; for, at one time or another, I thought I loved
each of them.

"Why didn't I marry them, then?"

For the same reason that many another woman does not. We are afraid to
trust our own likings. Too many of them are but sunrise vapors, very
rosy to begin with, but by mid-day as