The Tutor's Companion or, Complete Practical Arithmetic
Francis Walkingame's 'Tutors Companion' was one of the most widely published and used arithmetic textbooks of the 18th and 19th century. First published in 1751 it was then re-issued and edited by many different people over the succeeding years. See the article by Ian Michael at http://w4.ed.uiuc.edu/faculty/westbury/Paradigm/Michael.html. This is a copy of Isaac Butler's edition, first publised in 1855.
The misery that this book must be responsible for! A wonderful book aimed at teaching quite complicated mathematics to school-children in the nineteenth century, and one that covers many topics that are taboo in modern schools - who teaches 'Fellowship without time' or 'conjoined proportions' these days? How many of today's pupils know how many gallons there are in a hogshead or barleycorns in a foot. Most of them are so ignorant as to think that there are 1760 yards in a mile - not in Poland there aren't!
So many basic techniques have been lost: rule 5 of Tare and Tret for example - "When cloff is allowed, multiply the cwt. suttle by 2, divide the product by 3; the quotient will be the pounds cloff, which subtract from the suttle, the remainder will be neat" - obvious, no?
Digitised by: Nigel Callaghan, April 2006
Digitisation note: Scanned at 300dpi greyscale on Canon MP750 flatbed scanner. OCR by Finereader 7.0, un-corrected. Web images resized to jpeg at 50% quality, max dimension 900px.
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