Weekly Trinity Journal

Decimal Testimony.—There is also another important custom, or feature which distinguishes all nations of the earth and which would seem to mark a common or cotemporaneous origin. There has been found no tribe or people who have adopted a system of numerals that do not proceed in decimal repetitions, or regular successions of tens, and pause at the tenth repetition or one hundred, to re-commence this decimal repetition, till it reaches a thousand. When we consider the facility with which abstruse mathematical calculations are performed by this system of decimal numbering, and which would be infinitely tedious by the choice of any other number, it is surprising that even the most ignorant and unlettered tribes should have been led to its adoption, apparently through instinct, yet, undoubtedly through a primitive knowledge, faint traces of which have been carried away from the parent stock, and preserved in traditionary lessons, through ages of darkness. There are also a considerable number of words which have preserved their meaning, and a similarity of sound, and which mark more strongly still an era in human history when all mankind possessed a common language and country. Theology and science both point to this era in the existence of the world, and dating from that period, what a field is furnished for the imagination to trace the gradual progress from primitive ignorance to the light of the present day. Human intelligence gathering power in every new conquest over error, and aided by the press which perpetuates its victories, emerges from the darkness in which it long slumbered, but still leaves behind the traces of its unity of origin and its vigorous progress.—Yreka Union.