DATA AND NOTES. 365 



in these studies have assumed that there is first the hand and then by the 

 accuracy of digital mathematics the numeral has followed. 



It has not been found necessary to call the numeral one after some object 

 which is a visible unit in nature: one is not the word for nose, for an 

 instance; nor is two the word for eyes or ears, which as pairs upon the 

 primitive mathematician are surely as visible, tangible, obvious as the five 

 fingers of one hand. Three is found to be independent of any such concrete 

 presentation ; four also. Why, then, must five be considered a secondary 

 sense of hand ? 



As to our English five we might see a beautiful reasonableness in naming 

 it from the fingers of our own mathematical hands. We stick up our fingers 

 in reckoning ; the first task of our nursemaid mathematicians at school is to 

 teach the child that sums are no longer to be done on the fingers but on 

 slates with pencils. Thereafter follows mental arithmetic with a new series 

 of tortures all its own. 



But in the islands of our study fingers go not up but down for the count. 

 The hand with its digits displayed coram publico is zero, cipher, naught. 

 It is the clenched fist which counts most, it reckons five ; a usage paralleled, 

 to be sure, in our idiom of that noble art of defending usually most ignoble 

 selves, "I put my 'bunch of fives' in his — " mug, was it? Or peeper? Or 

 possibly breadbasket, this being before the days when solar plexus had 

 given to the ring the dignity of astrological anatomy. The five of the 

 clenched fist I recall from many an island race. 



Let me, however, confirm my testimony from an authority who believes 

 that five is the hand, Dr. Codrington (Melanesian Languages 222, notei): 



The way of reckoning on the fingers differs in various islands. In Nengone the fingers 

 are turned up and brought together at five. In the Banks Islands the fingers are turned 

 down. This is often done with the spoken numerals, often without the use of words. 

 The practice of turning down the fingers, contrary to our practice, deserves notice, as 

 perhaps explaining why sometimes savages are reported to be unable to count above 

 four. The European holds up one finger, which he counts, the native counts those that 

 are down and says "four." Two fingers held up, the native counting those that are 

 down, calls three; and so on until the white man, holding up five fingers, gives the 

 native none turned down to count. The native is nonplussed, and the enquirer reports 

 that savages can not count above four. 



It may well be that I shall seem heterodox in placing five as the parent 

 sense, yet if there be any meaning at all in the foregoing table I am resting 

 upon demonstrable facts and not upon mere fancy. Many of the languages 

 collated in this and the next item show no difference in form between the 

 two senses, the word is the same. Such instances are negative, they lack 

 evidential value, they prove nothing, they disprove nothing. 



This table which I have compiled is far from complete ; in many languages 

 I have the five word and the hand word has not been recorded in the scanti- 

 ness of most of this vocabulary material. Here I have assembled twenty- 

 eight languages, all that I have been able to bring into comparison, in which 

 the five word and the hand word are homogenetic yet variant. I might 

 have extended the list by the inclusion of languages in which the five word 

 is a lima form and the hand word is heterogenetic. These I omit, for, while 

 they are not without their value in pointing to a primal ftve-lima, they 

 would beyond that complicate the problem by the addition of incommen- 

 surable factors. 



