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257
CURIOUS MEMORIAL OF SWEDENBORG,
66
CONCERNING
CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN.*
Having been frequently admitted (says Swedenborg,)
to the honour of hearing his late most excellent Majesty
Charles XII. discourse on mathematical subjects, I pre
sume an account of a new arithmetic invented by him,
may merit the attention of my readers.
" His Majesty observed, then, that the denary arith
metic, universally received and practised, was most pro
bably derived from the original method of counting on
the fingers ; that illiterate people of old, when they had
run through the fingers of both hands, repeated new
periods over and over again, and every time spread open
both hands ; which being done ten times, they distin
guished each step by proper marks, as by joining two,
three, or four fingers. Afterwards, when this method of
numeration on the fingers came to be expressed by proper
characters, it soon became firmly and universally esta
blished, and so the denary computus has been retained
to this day. But surely, were a solid geometrician,
thoroughly versed in the abstract nature and fundamentals
* The above memorial was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine
for Sept. 1754, and inserted in the Intellectual Repository for 1815,
p. 259. It was no doubt written by the honourable author long
prior to his being called to the sacred office which occupied the
last 29 years of his life ; which accounts for his speaking of the
celebrated Charles XII. with so much greater respect than he is
known to have afterwards entertained for his memory. The
Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine does not state by what means
he obtained possession of the article ;-he most probably trans
lated it from some foreign journal, or the Transactions ofthe Royal
Academy of Stockholm ; in which it might have appeared long
before its publication in English. That Swedenborg had frequent
interviews with Charles XII., we have seen above p. 7.
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