CHAPTER V - PREHISTORIC AND EGYPTIAN GEOMETRY

Summary

The earliest history of Geometry cannot be treated in the same way as that of Arithmetic. There is not for the former, as there is for the latter, a nomenclature common to many nations and languages; and the analysis of a geometrical name in any one language leads only to the discovery of a rootsyllable which is common to many very different words and to which only the vaguest possible meaning may be assigned. Nor is any assistance, so far as I know, furnished by travellers among savage and primitive races. Arithmetical operations are matters of such daily necessity that every general arithmetical proposition, of which a man is capable, is pretty certain to be applied in his practice and to attract attention: but a man may well know a hundred geometrical propositions which he never once has occasion to use, and which therefore escape notice. I have sought, in vain, through many books which purport to describe the habits and psychology of the lower races, for some allusion to their geometrical knowledge or for an account of some operations which seem to imply geometrical notions. One would be glad, for instance, to learn whether savages anywhere distinguish a right angle from an acute. Have they any mode of ascertaining whether a line is exactly straight or exactly circular? Do they by name distinguish a square from any other rectilineal figure? Do they attach any mysterious properties to perpendicularity, angular symmetry, etc.?