The Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

which some adhere so tenaciously, apparently
because they have not ascertained the essential quality of a base.
The second is the numeration of things by personal parts, as fingers,
hands, etc.,--suggesting a base of numeration that has no agreement

with the binary, nor with personal proportion, neither can it have with
any proper general system. Are there any things in Nature that exist by
tens, that associate by tens, that separate into tenths? Are there any
things that are sold by tens, or by tenths? Even the fingers number eight,
and, had there been any reflection used in the adoption of a base of
numeration, the thumbs would not have been included. The ease with
which the simplest arithmetical series may be continued led our fathers
quietly to the adoption, first, of the quinary, and second, of the decimal
group; and we have continued its use so quietly, that its propriety has
rarely been questioned; indeed, most persons are both surprised and
offended, when they hear it declared to be a purely artificial base,
proper only to abstract numbers.
The binary base, on the contrary, is natural, real, simple, and accords
with the tendency of the mind to simplify, to individualize. In business,
who ever thinks of a half as two-fourths, or three-sixths, much less as
two-and-a-half-fifths, or three-and-a-half-sevenths? For division by two
produces a half at one operation; but with any other divisor, the
reduction is too great, and must be followed by multiplication. Think of
calling a half five-tenths, a quarter twenty-five-hundredths, an eighth
one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousandths! Arithmetic is seldom used
as a plaything. It generally comes into use when the mind is too much
occupied for sporting. Consequently, the smallest divisor that will serve
the purpose is always preferred. A calculation is an appendage to a
mercantile transaction, not a part of the transaction itself; it is, indeed, a
hindrance, and in large business is performed by a distinct person. But
even with him, simplicity, because necessary to speed, is second in
merit only to correctness.
The binary base is not only simple, it is real. Accordingly, it has large
agreement with the popular divisions of weights, etc. Grocers' weights,
up to the four-pound piece, and all their measures, are binary; so are the
divisions of the yard, the inch, etc.
It is not only simple and real, it is natural. On every hand, things may
be found that are duplex in form, that associate in pairs, that separate
into halves, that may be divided into two equal parts. Things are

continually sold in pairs, in halves, and in quantities produced by
halving.
The binary base, therefore, is here proposed, as the only proper base for
gradation; and the octonal, as the true commercial base, for numeration
and notation: two bases which in combination form a binoctonal system
that is at once simple, comprehensive, and efficient.

MY LAST LOVE.
I had counted many more in my girlhood, in the first flush of
blossoming,--and a few, good men and true, whom I never meet even
now without an added color; for, at one time or another, I thought I
loved each of them.
"Why didn't I marry them, then?"
For the same reason that many another woman does not. We are afraid
to trust our own likings. Too many of them are but sunrise vapors, very
rosy to begin with, but by mid-day as dingy as any old dead cloud with
the rain all shed out of it. I never see any of those old swains of mine,
without feeling profoundly thankful that I don't belong to him. I
shouldn't want to look over my husband's head in any sense. So they all
got wives and children, and I lived an old maid,--although I was
scarcely conscious of the state; for, if my own eyes or other people's
testimony were to be trusted, I didn't look old, and I'm quite sure I
didn't feel so. But I came to myself on my thirty-second birthday, an
old maid most truly, without benefit of clergy. And thereby hangs this
tale; for on that birthday I first made acquaintance with my last love.
Something like a month before, there had come to Huntsville two
gentlemen in search of game and quiet quarters for the summer. They
soon found that a hotel in a country village affords little seclusion; but
the woods were full of game, the mountain-brooks swarmed with trout
too fine to be given up, and they decided to take a house of their own.
After some search, they fixed on an old house, (I've forgotten whose

"folly" it was called,) full a mile and a half from town, standing upon a
mossy hill that bounded my fields, square and stiff and weather-beaten,
and without any protection except a ragged pine-tree that thrust its