May we infer from this that arithmetic is a primitive, rudimentary and low branch of mathematics, having little or no relation to the perceptions of childhood, the imagination of youth and the reasoning powers of the matured mind, and hence of little or no value for the purpose of mental exercise and stimulation?
2. His whole process was that of multiplication, and its inversion (division). He seems not to have practiced addition, which is in reality the rudiments of multiplication, or its converse, subtraction, which is only the long process of division. In the multiplication of large numbers, which so astounded people, he performed mentally several operations to get the result.
May we infer from this analysis—arithmetic being assumed to be the most unintellectual form of mathematics—that multiplication is the least valuable part of arithmetic?
If psychologists should grant these inferences to be sound, it remains the duty of teachers to address themselves to improving the teaching of the multiplication table, as the weak spot in all our primary education in numbers. Something can be done, perhaps, to idealize the multiplication table, and to make instruction in it concrete, objective, rational. Can not a child be shown why or how six times seven make forty-two? If arithmetic is so abstract, arbitrary and barren of ideas that this can not be done, were it not better to cease compelling the miniature mind to repeat year after year such stale and silly truisms as, “twice two are four,” etc., under the absurd expectation that some prodigious mental outburst must result from it in some mysterious manner? Why not substitute for this endless repetition “Eiry eiry, ickery Ann, fillisy follisy, Nicholas John,” to accomplish the same result?
Some good teachers, here and there, are working on the problem of how to make arithmetic educational as well as useful. A person who has lively recollections of days and weeks and months wasted on the dead-lift of memorizing the multiplication table, as an achievement by the side of which all subsequent labors of life were easy, will find comfort in the perfect uselessness of Colburn’s wonderful genius for multiplication without effort.
But it was a wonderful faculty. What if a man were born with all his faculties expanded to the same degree! Shall education and inherited progress yet produce minds as nearly infinite in every power as Zerah Colburn’s was in one? Is there, is there an educational method which can take the shackles off all the faculties?
If not, may there be somewhere a life in which the mind, let out of the strait earthly house of its tabernacle and freed from the sore limitations of physical nature may reach that acme in all its functions? Some of the operations of mind in a condition of suspended physical existence seem to suggest this as a probability for even common-place natures, as occasionally do such splendid exhibitions of a single faculty in so weak a nature as Zerah Colburn’s.
[B] Another expedient adopted to keep the wolf from the door was to ask subscriptions to the yet unpublished and unwritten memoir of the lad. As he had by this time been able to formulate the method by which he made his mental computations, the father advertised to impart the secret of Zerah’s mysterious power to any one who would subscribe for ten copies of the memoir at eight dollars the copy.
