THE PROBLEMS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 43 



ties in linguistic details may also be observed. Primitive lan- 

 guages abound in reduplicative 'words, as is shown in many words 

 that we have adopted from them, such as cocoa, anana, agar- 

 agar, pow-woiu ; and Sir John Lubbock has found from twenty 

 to eighty times as many such reduplications in savage as in Euro- 

 pean tongues. Children are constantly using reduplications, some 

 of which we have adopted from their baby talk ; such as papa, 

 mamma, the German amme, pupe, the French bebe. The imi- 

 tative faculty, a marked characteristic of savages and children, 

 appears in language in the many words founded upon direct imi- 

 tation or sound analogy. The child speaks of the mu-mu, the 

 bow-wow, the tick-tack, the shu-shu, the ting-a-ling ; and the 

 large proportion of onomatopoetic words in savage tongues is 

 well recognized. Difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds, in- 

 accuracy of articulation, a mention of only the prominent words 

 without definite order and connection, a mere skeletonizing of 

 the sentence — these and the like are found both in the infancy of 

 language and in the infant's language.* 



The characteristics of language are often indicative of the men- 

 tal traits of those who use it. The child's word sphere is at first 

 concrete and specific, acquiring but very gradually a use of ideas 

 and words that are generic and abstract. These are equally the 

 limitations of the savage mind ; the absence of generic and abstract 

 words in savage tongues has been noted by various travelers. 

 Some Brazilian tribes have "separate names for the different 

 parts of the body, and for all the different animals and plants 

 with which they were acquainted, but were entirely deficient in 

 such terms as ' color,' ' tone,' 'sex,' ' genus,' ' spirit,' " etc. The lan- 

 guage of the Veddahs (Ceylon) is said to be so primitive "that the 

 most ordinary objects and actions of life are described by quaint 

 paraphrases." Some of the Indian tongues have words for red 

 oak, white oak, etc., but not for oak or for tree. Other evidence 

 of the mental poverty is easily supplied. "The mind of the 

 savage," says Sir John Lubbock, "like that of the child, is easily 

 fatigued, and will then give random answers to spare himself the 

 trouble of thought." Mr. Galton says of the Damaras that they 

 never generalize, and " a Damara who knew the road perfectly 

 from A to B, and again from B to C, would have no idea of a 

 straight cut from A to C ; he has no map of the country in his 

 mind, but an infinity of local details." 



The savage and childish conceptions of quantity, number, 

 time, and space show striking similarities of limitation and de- 



* The study of the natural language of the deaf-mutes yields important corroborations 

 of many points. This has been ably studied by Mr. Tylor in his essays on Gesture Lan- 

 guage, in Early History of Mankind ; see especially page 54. 



