name apices adhered to the Hindu-Arabic numerals until the sixteenth century.[[469]]

To the figures on the apices were given the names Igin, andras, ormis, arbas, quimas, calctis or caltis, zenis, temenias, celentis, sipos,[[470]] the origin and meaning of which still remain a mystery. The Semitic origin of several of the words seems probable. Wahud, thaneine,

thalata, arba, kumsa, setta, sebba, timinia, taseud are given by the Rev. R. Patrick[[471]] as the names, in an Arabic dialect used in Morocco, for the numerals from one to nine. Of these the words for four, five, and eight are strikingly like those given above.

The name apices was not, however, a common one in later times. Notae was more often used, and it finally gave the name to notation.[[472]] Still more common were the names figures, ciphers, signs, elements, and characters.[[473]]

So little effect did the teachings of Gerbert have in making known the new numerals, that O'Creat, who lived a century later, a friend and pupil of Adelhard

of Bath, used the zero with the Roman characters, in contrast to Gerbert's use of the ġobār forms without the zero.[[474]] O'Creat uses three forms for zero, o, ō, and τ, as in Maximus Planudes. With this use of the zero goes, naturally, a place value, for he writes III III for 33, ICCOO and I. II. τ. τ for 1200, I. O. VIII. IX for 1089, and I. IIII. IIII. ττττ for the square of 1200.

The period from the time of Gerbert until after the appearance of Leonardo's monumental work may be called the period of the abacists. Even for many years after the appearance early in the twelfth century of the books explaining the Hindu art of reckoning, there was strife between the abacists, the advocates of the abacus, and the algorists, those who favored the new numerals. The words cifra and algorismus cifra were used with a somewhat derisive significance, indicative of absolute uselessness, as indeed the zero is useless on an abacus in which the value of any unit is given by the column which it occupies.[[475]] So Gautier de Coincy (1177-1236) in a work on the miracles of Mary says:

A horned beast, a sheep,

An algorismus-cipher,

Is a priest, who on such a feast day