Was cradled in his youth.
ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.
By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
IV.—THE MATHEMATICAL FAILURE.
We do not often hear those who declare that “education does not educate,” trying to account for the failure charged against existing school systems. Are the alleged defects to be found in the unfit nature of the things studied, or in methods of study, or both? One of the chief exercises—indeed the chief, in common schools—depended upon for mental development is numbers. Is the study of arithmetic worthy the place it holds in that regard? Does it do more than to cultivate a special faculty? Is that faculty one of the most important in the human mind? Is it related intimately to understanding, and does its culture imply a stimulation of the reasoning powers?
Answers to these questions would doubtless be colored by the mental characteristics or experience of the individual answering. To some minds mathematics is a general stimulant; to others only a useful tool; to still others, a stumbling block and an offense. Some one has declared that while all specialties followed exclusively, are narrowing in their influence on the mind, the two specialties which lead straightest toward imbecility are music and mathematics. This was probably the conclusion of a mind which could not master the extraction of the cube root, and did not know “Yankee Doodle” from “Old Hundred.” Oliver Goldsmith said “Mathematics is a study to which the meanest intellect is competent.” He remembered many floggings because of the multiplication table, and hardly had patience to count change for a sovereign. If we appeal to first-rate examples of achievement in music and mathematics—say to a Mozart and a Newton—we shall find well-balanced minds; but on the other hand we may be confounded by finding prodigies in these lines who possess mean intellects otherwise. Blind Tom and Zerah Colburn are illustrations. Zerah Colburn had mathematics in “the natural way.” His parents in Vermont were poor and ignorant; the father appears to have been both selfish and stupid, but the mother was rather a shrewd Yankee woman. If there was any special gift in the family it was for hard work and sharp trading—rather commonplace gifts in New England. Out of this unpromising stock came Zerah in 1804. One day, when he was six years old, he flashed out a mathematical meteor, a revelation. His father overheard him reciting in his play the multiplication table, having never learned it. Examination showed that he knew it all and more too; was, in fact, himself a walking, frisking multiplication table. He answered instantly the product of 13×97—1261. The gift seemed to have descended on him then and there miraculously; the fact probably was that it had always been there, but he had been too dull to exercise it until the whim struck the little animal.
The event created a sensation, which, inside of a year, was felt both in America and Europe. The popular wonder with which the child’s performance was received very speedily turned the head of his stupidly cunning father; he dropped his farm tools and rejecting all the offers of wealthy gentlemen to give the boy a complete education, set out to exhibit the prodigy through the land as a show. Thereafter, so long as both lived, the father was the evil genius of the son.