narrating a conversation which occurred while he was at Carnarvon, a little
town in Wales. "It was on this occasion," he says, "that I learned how
vague are the ideas of number in unpractised minds. 'What number of people
do you think,' I said to an elderly person, 'will be assembled this day at
Carnarvon?' 'What number?' rejoined the person addressed; 'what number?
Well, really, now, I should reckon--perhaps a matter of four million.' Four
millions of _extra_ people in little Carnarvon, that could barely find
accommodation (I should calculate) for an extra four hundred!" So the
Eskimo and the South American Indian are, after all, not so very far behind
the "elderly person" of Carnarvon, in the distinct perception of a number
which familiarity renders to us absurdly small.





CHAPTER III.

THE ORIGIN OF NUMBER WORDS.


In the comparison of languages and the search for primitive root forms, no
class of expressions has been subjected to closer scrutiny than the little
cluster of words, found in each language, which constitutes a part of the
daily vocabulary of almost every human being--the words with which we begin
our counting. It is assumed, and with good reason, that these are among the
earlier words to appear in any language; and in the mutations of human
speech, they are found to suffer less than almost any other portion of a
language. Kinship between tongues remote from each other has in many
instances been detected by the similarity found to exist among the