METHODS OF SCIENCE; NUMBERS 15 



this formula for tallying objects and occur- 

 rences. When the school clock strikes after the 

 noon hour, it says to him "eeny" and later on 

 "eeny, meeny," and again "eeny, meeny, miny," 

 when the class is dismissed. As the boys leave 

 their classroom in a procession, in the order of 

 their ages, the little lame boy checks them off 

 with his formula, one word to a boy, and he has 

 come to think of the oldest boy as "eeny," the 

 next as "meeny" and so on to the youngest, who 

 comes out last at the word "nigger." 



This habit of picking out some series of fa- 

 miliar words and using them for tallying and 

 naming other sequences of things or events we 

 call assigning order-names or ordinal numbers. 

 After the alphabet was introduced the Greeks 

 used a, /?, 7, 8, as symbols to express ordinal 

 numbers; but long before the invention of the 

 alphabet, and even before the parent Indo- 

 European language was scattered to the four 

 quarters of the earth, it possessed a counting 

 series which, with but slight changes in pro- 

 nunciation, we have to-day in our one, two, 

 three, four. 



Let us return to our parable. One day the 

 little boy had the idea of tallying the class, not 

 as they left the schoolroom but as they entered, 



