Genre:

Reportage

Subjects:

Education, Class, Mathematics

    Quotes the speech of Thomas F Buxton at the society's anniversary meeting, relating an anecdote of a 'gentleman, who always told him that there were three things detrimental to the poor, and that those three things were—reading, writing, and arithmetic'. The man's bailiff kept accounts using peas, beans, and corn arranged in a chest of drawers: 'all went on right enough, and his fame as a calculator flourished; but alas! on one unlucky day, a rat got into the books, and made desperate havoc with the cash accounts, memorandums, and balance sheets of our accountant, and the fine fabric of horse-bean mathematics became deposited in the belly of the rat' (479).