"Thirtie daies hath September, Aprill, June and November,
Februarie eight and twentie alone, all the rest thirtie and one."
is given by Halliwell as 1633. I have found it in an old arithmetic printed in London in 1596. The lines beginning "Multiplication is vexation," are not an outburst of modern students. They are found in a manuscript dated 1570 circa.
"Multiplication is mie vexation
And Division quite as bad,
The Golden rule is mie stumbling stule,
And Practice makes me mad."
After the Revolution, in new and zealous Americanism, text-books by American authors outsold English books. The blue-backed spelling book of Noah Webster drove Perry and Dilworth from the field. Bingham and Webster took advantage of the need of suitable school-books and divided the field between them. Webster's Spelling Book outstripped Bingham's Child's Companion, but Bingham's Readers, such as The American Preceptor and The Columbian Orator held their ground against Webster's. Not one of Bingham's books proved a failure. The Columbian Orator contained seven extracts from speeches of Pitt in opposition to the measures of George III., it had speeches by Fox and Sheridan, part of the address of President Carnot at the establishment of the French Republic, and the famous speech of Colonel Barré on the Stamp Act.
Nicholas Pike of Newburyport, Massachusetts, wrote an arithmetic that routed the English books of Cocker and Hodder. It was studied by many persons now living. It had three hundred and sixty-three barren rules, and not a single explanation of one of them. Many of them would now be wholly unintelligible to scholars, though no more antiquated than are the methods; for instance, this rule in Tare and Trett:—
"Deduct the Tare and Trett. Divide the Suttle by amount given; the Quotient will be the Cloff which subtract from the Suttle the Remainder will be the Neat."
