The radically different elementary texts appearing recently mark a reaction against the failure of earlier books to take advantage of the modern developments in mathematics. In many of the new texts the novelty is in the subject matter, whereas in the present one modern methods are used to develop conventional subject matter. A cursory reading of this text may give the impression that the employment of these modern techniques presupposes a high degree of sophistication on the part of the student. This is not the case. The reader is carefully prepared for the modern techniques and they should cause no more difficulty than the older methods. Often a modern method has a much broader range of applicability than the older one, although the two methods can be applied with comparable difficulty to the development of a given subject. In such cases modern methods are used in this text.