DECIMAL NOTATION • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Decimal notation

... high as 100,000. But mere counting does not imply either the possession or the use of anything that can be really called the mathematical faculty, the exercise of which in any broad sense has only been possible since the introduction of the decimal notation. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Chinese had all such cumbrous systems, that anything like a science of arithmetic, beyond very simple operations, was impossible; and the Roman system, by which the year 1888 would be written MDCCCLXXXVIII, was that ...

— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace