"With regard to the division sum, it was quite possible to divide by a sum, but not by money. How could any one divide money by 2l. 16s. 8d.? (Laughter.) The question might be asked, 'How many times 2s. will go into 1l.?' but that was not dividing by money; it was simply dividing 20 by 2. He might be asked, 'How many times will 6s. 8d. go into a pound?' but it was only required to divide 240 by 80. If the right hon. gentleman were to ask the hon.
member for Brighton (Professor Fawcett),[[397]] or any other authority, he would receive the same answer—viz., that it was possible to divide by a sum, but not by money. (Hear.)"
I shall leave all comment for the second edition, if I publish one.[[398]] I shall be sure to have something to laugh at. Anything said from a respectable quarter, or supposed to be said, is sure to find defenders. Sam Johnson, a sound arithmetician, comparing himself, and what he alone had done in three years, with forty French Academicians and their forty years, said it proved that an Englishman is to a Frenchman as 40 × 40 to 3, or as 1600 to 3. Boswell, who was no great hand at arithmetic, made him say that an Englishman is to a Frenchman as 3 to 1600. When I pointed this out, the supposed Johnson was defended through thick and thin in Notes and Queries.
I am now curious to see whether the following will find a palliator. It is from "Tristram Shandy," book V. chapter 3. There are two curious idioms, "for for" and "half in half"; but these have nothing to do with my point:
"A blessing which tied up my father's tongue, and a misfortune which set it loose with a good grace, were pretty equal: sometimes, indeed, the misfortune was the better of the two; for, for instance, where the pleasure of harangue was as ten, and the pain of the misfortune but as five, my father gained half in half; and consequently was as well again off as if it had never befallen him."
This is a jolly confusion of ideas; and wants nothing but a defender to make it perfect. A person who invests five
with a return of ten, and one who loses five with one hand and gains ten with the other, both leave off five richer than they began, no doubt. The first gains "half in half," more properly "half on half," that is, of the return, 10, the second 5 is gain upon the first 5 invested. "Half in half" is a queer way of saying cent. per cent. If the 5l. invested be all the man had in the world, he comes out, after the gain, twice as well off as he began, with reference to his whole fortune. But it is very odd to say that balance of 5l. gain is twice as good as if nothing had befallen, either loss or gain. A mathematician thinks 5 an infinite number of times as great as 0. The whole confusion is not so apparent when money is in question: for money is money whether gained or lost. But though pleasure and pain stand to one another in the same algebraical relation as money gained and lost, yet there is more than algebra can take account of in the difference.
Next, Ri. Milward[[399]] (Richard, no doubt, but it cannot be proved) who published Selden's[[400]] Table Talk, which he had collected while serving as amanuensis, makes Selden say, "A subsidy was counted the fifth part of a man's estate; and so fifty subsidies is five and forty times more than a man is worth." For times read subsidies, which seems part of the confusion, and there remains the making all the subsidies equal to the first, though the whole of which they are to be the fifths is perpetually diminished.
Thirdly, there is the confusion of the great misomath
of our own day, who discovered two quantities which he avers to be identically the same, but the greater the one the less the other. He had a truth in his mind, which his notions of quantity were inadequate to clothe in language. This erroneous phraseology has not found a defender; and I am almost inclined to say, with Falstaff, The poor abuses of the time want countenance.