The wonderfully procreative power of figures, or, rather, their accumulative growth, has been exemplified in that familiar story of the farmer, who, undertaking to pay his farrier one grain of wheat for the first nail, two for the second, four for the third, and so on, found that he had bargained to give the farrier more wheat than was grown in all England.
My beloved young friends who love to frequent the roulette-table, do you know that if you begin with a dime, and were allowed to leave all your winnings on the table, five consecutive lucky guesses would give you almost a million and a half of dollars, or, to be exact, $1,450,625.52?
Yet that would be the result of winning thirty-five for one five times hand-running.
Here is another example. Take the number 15, let us say. Multiply that by itself, and you get 225. Now multiply 225 by itself, and so on until fifteen products have been multiplied by themselves in turn.
You don't think that is a difficult problem? Well, you may be a clever mathematician, but it would take you about a quarter of a century to work out this simple little sum.
The final product called for contains 38,589 figures, the first of which are 1,442. Allowing three figures to an inch, the answer would be more than a thousand feet long. To perform the operation would require about 500,000,000 figures. If they can be made at the rate of one a minute, a person working ten hours a day for three hundred days in each year would be twenty-eight years about it.
NUMBERS THAT EQUIVOCATED.
The Woman's Home Companion repeats a good story that is told of a quick-witted Irishman with a natural aptitude for mental arithmetic who was working in a field with a Dutchman, when they unearthed a box of silver coins. The covetous Dutchman at once laid claim to the whole booty, because he was the first to break it open and discover its valuable contents.
"Go softly," said the Irishman, "for the whole business is mine. It's a bit of money that was left me by an uncle, and I buried it here for safe-keeping. There was a thousand dollars."
"All right with that," replied the Dutchman, as he caught on to the bait. "If you tell me how much money there is, it's with you; if you miss, she's mine."