the case; and among the Yorubas of Abeokuta[49] the extraordinary saying,
"You may seem very clever, but you can't tell nine times nine," shows how
surprisingly this faculty has been developed, considering the general
condition of savagery in which the tribe lived. There can be no doubt that,
in general, the growth of the number sense keeps pace with the growth of
the intelligence in other respects. But when it is remembered that the
Tonga Islanders have numerals up to 100,000, and the Tembus, the Fingoes,
the Pondos, and a dozen other South African tribes go as high as 1,000,000;
and that Leigh Hunt never could learn the multiplication table, one must
confess that this law occasionally presents to our consideration remarkable
exceptions.

While considering the extent of the savage's arithmetical knowledge, of his
ability to count and to grasp the meaning of number, it may not be amiss to
ask ourselves the question, what is the extent of the development of our
own number sense? To what limit can we absorb the idea of number, with a
complete appreciation of the idea of the number of units involved in any
written or spoken quantity? Our perfect system of numeration enables us to
express without difficulty any desired number, no matter how great or how
small it be. But how much of actually clear comprehension does the number
thus expressed convey to the mind? We say that one place is 100 miles from
another; that A paid B 1000 dollars for a certain piece of property; that a
given city contains 10,000 inhabitants; that 100,000 bushels of wheat were
shipped from Duluth or Odessa on such a day; that 1,000,000 feet of lumber
were destroyed by the fire of yesterday,--and as we pass from the smallest
to the largest of the numbers thus instanced, and from the largest on to
those still larger, we repeat the question just asked; and we repeat it
with a new sense of our own mental limitation. The number 100
unquestionably stands for a distinct conception. Perhaps the same may be
said for 1000, though this could not be postulated with equal certainty.