ind of dispute.

"'Language and counting,' says the learned author, 'both came before the
logical discussion of either. It is not allowable to argue that something
is or was, because it ought to be or ought to have been. That two negatives
make an affirmative, ought to be; if _no_ man have done _nothing_, the man
who has done nothing does not exist, and _every_ man has done _something_.
But in Greek, and in uneducated English, it is unquestionable that 'no man
has done nothing' is only an emphatic way of saying that no man has done
_anything_; and it would be absurd to reason that it could not have been
so, because it should not.'--p. 5.

"'But there _is_ another difference between old and new times, yet more
remarkable, for we have _nothing_ of it now: whereas in things indivisible
we count with our fathers, and should say in buying an acre of land, that
the result has no parts, and that the purchaser, till he owns all the
ground, owns none, the change of possession being instantaneous. This
second difference lies in the habit of considering nothing, nought, zero,
cipher, or whatever it may be called, to be at the beginning of the scale
of numbers. Count four days from Monday: we should now say Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday; formerly, it would have been Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday. Had we asked, what at that rate is the first day from
Monday, all would have stared at a phrase they had never heard. Those who
were capable of extending language would have said, Why it must be Monday
itself: the rest would have said, there can {150} be no first day from
Monday, for the day after is Tuesday, which must be the second day: Monday,
one; Tuesday, two,'--p. 10.

"We assure our readers that the whole article is equally lucid, and its
logic alike formal.

"There are some exceedingly valuable footnotes; we give one of the most
interesting, taken from the learned Mr. Halliwell's profound book on
Nursery Rhymes[264]--a celebrated production, for which it is supposed the
author was made F.R.S.

"'_One's nine_,
Two's some,
Three's a many,
Four's a penny,
Five's a little hundred.'

'The last line refers to five score, the so-called hundred being more
usually six score. The first line, looked at etymologically, is _one is not
one_, and the change of thought by which _nine_, the decimal of _one_, aims
to be associated with the decimal of _plurality_ is curious:'--Very.

"This valuable and profound essay