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A customer of mine has been clearing her house of a lot of old stuff over some months. While there to replace some doors recently, I snagged from her latest pile of outgoing junk her late husband's 1949 edition Ginn & Co. algebra text. I thought I'd keep it in the truck, with the idea of boning up a little, since I want to take the GRE later this year. When I finally took a look at it this week, I was delighted to discover that it contained as frontispiece a facsimile of a sixteenth-century English algebra — in fact, it seems, the very first English algebra, The Whetstone of Witte of Robert Recorde.

In the mid-sixteenth century one wouldn't publish even an algebra, apparently, without some opening verse to put things on sound footing. Here's that metrical matter rendered in today's less noble & arbitrary orthography:

Though many stones do bear great price,
The whetstone is for exercise
As needful, and in work as strange:
Dull things and hard it will so change
And make them sharp, to right good use:
All artsmen know they cannot choose
But use his help; yet as men see,
No sharpness seemeth in it to be.

The ground of arts did breed this stone;
His use is great, and more than one.
Here if you lift your wits to whet,
Much sharpness thereby shall you get.
Dull wits hereby do greatly mend,
Sharp wits are fined to their full end.
Now prove and praise as you do find,
And to yourself be not unkind.

Lovely!

If you're wondering what 'the cossicke practise' might refer to, and whether the term as used here contains a pun, see the bottom of this page.