THE PACKARD COMMERCIAL ARITHMETIC. BY S. S. PACKARD, FRESIDENT OF PACKARD'S BUSINESS COLLEGE, NEW YORK, AUTHOR OF THE BRYANT AND COURSE OF BUSINESS TRAINING, AND BYRON HORTON, A. M., PRINCIPAL OF THE MATHEMATICAL DEPARTMENT OF PACKARD'S BUSINESS COLLEGE. PC7 THE PACKARD COMMERCIAL ARITHMETIC. COMPLETE EDITION, 328 PAGES, OCTAVO. SCHOOL EDITION, 276 PAGES, 12MO. KEY TO COMPLETE EDITION (FOR TEACHERS), $1.00. KEY TO SCHOOL EDITION-IN PREPARATION. The complete edition is published both with and without answers. Unless COPYRIGHT, 1882, BY S. S. PACKARD AND BYRON HORTON. Electrotyped by Printed by PREFACE. HE question as to whether a new Commercial Arithmetic was the publication of this volume. It does not necessarily argue that other arithmetics have failed to meet a large popular demand, or that those who use them are dissatisfied with them. It simply emphasizes the fact that what may suit one intelligent teacher will not, for that reason alone, suit another; and nothing could make this point clearer than to state, what is really true, that all the Commercial Arithmetics that have appeared during the past ten years have been prepared by active teachers, who required certain things in their own work not to be found in existing books. There are few, if any, text books that could not, in some respects, be changed to advantage by those who use them; and the main. reason why there are not fifty text books where there is but one is a reason of economy, rather than of inability of teachers to prepare their own books, or even of entire satisfaction with the books in use. It is worthy of notice that, in the line of commercial text books particularly, there is a growing tendency to authorship on the part of wide awake teachers; so much so that there are to-day twenty treatises on book-keeping where there was one twenty years ago; and in the line of commercial mathematics, commercial law and practical grammar, one can safely calculate on a new book every six months. Nobody has a right to complain of this tendency. It should, in fact, give great satisfaction to all who are interested in practical education; for it not only speaks of the growing energy and intelligence of the teachers who have this education in charge, but especially of the appreciation of the public, through whose encouragement alone such worthy ambition can be gratified. The authors of this book do not claim to have discovered, all at once, that nobody hitherto has had the ability to prepare an arithmetic, or that it was impossible longer to utilize the books 183983 that have served the purposes of the past. They do not even claim that their book is better, or worse, than any or all of its predecessors; they claim only that it is different from any of them, and in this difference lies their only excuse for its appearance. The book was written to supply a known want in a single school, with the feeling, also, that other schools, having felt a similar want, might find it met, in some measure, through the efforts here put forth. In fact, a large number of teachers have already expressed such satisfaction in a practical way, and there are doubtless others, on the point of issuing their own books, who, upon a close examination of this, will find it so well suited to their purpose that they will be induced to lay aside for a time their unfinished manuscript, and possibly to defer publication indefinitely. There is no desire on the part of the authors of this book to discourage the publication of new arithmetics; but they are quite willing to do what lies in their power, in connection with their fellow-authors already in the field, to satisfy teachers so fully that they will find no good excuse for diverting their energies from the great work of oral instruction, but will seek rather to give to it new zest, with the consciousness that others are both willing and able to relieve them from the irksomeness and risk of book-making. It is not deemed necessary to point out with particularity the peculiar merits or demerits of the book. Both will be readily discerned by those who use it, and those who do not use it will care very little about them. We will only say that it is not a rehash of any book or books that have gone before it, and that in not a single instance have the authors relied for their statistics, their statements of local laws and customs, or any of their facts, upon other authors, either of the present or the past, but have uniformly obtained their information from the highest authentic sources. And, moreover, they propose to keep open these avenues of information, and to revise all future editions closely in reference to any changes that may occur. It is but justice to say that the main work of authorship has been done by the one whose name stands second on the title page, which renders it possible to add that it has been conscientiously and faithfully done. NEW YORK, October 2, 1882. |