ON TRACES OF THE EARLY MENTAL CONDITION OF MAN. 393 



But tliere is also evidence in tlio systems of numeration of most civilized lan- 

 guages that they, too, are the successors of a rude unspoken system of gesture 

 counting. The rule of the whole world is to count by fives, tens, and twenties; 

 the exceptions are so late or so incidental that we may neglect them and say that 

 the original counting of mankind is the quinary, the decimal, or the vigesimal 

 system, or a combination of these. We need not go abroad for examples. In 

 the Roman numerals, which count to V, and then begin again VI, VII, we have 

 the quinary system. The decimal system is our familiar one. And when we 

 speak of 'threescore and ten," "fourscore and thirteen," we are counting by the 

 vigesimal system, each " score" or notch, thus ideally made, standing for 20, for 

 "one n\an," as a Mexican or Carib would put it. It is a very curious thing that 

 both we and the French, having two good decimal systems of our own, should have 

 run off into vigesimalism. Wh}' should we have ever said "fourscore and thir- 

 teen" for the 93, which we have good Saxon tens to express? and why should 

 they say in France, " quatre-vingt-treize," instead of holding to the Latin original 

 of their language, and saying "nonante-troisf " The reason seems to be that 

 counting by scores is a strongly marked Keltic characteristic, found in Welsh, 

 Irish, Gaelic, and Breton, and has been taken up into the alien numeral systems 

 of France and England. At any rate, the rule of the world is to count by fives, 

 tens, and twenties ; and the connection of this rule with the practice of counting 

 on the fingers and toes will hardly be disputed. Indeed the remark has often 

 been made that the fact of our having 10 fingers and 10 toes has led us into a 

 system which is actually not the best ; while if we had liad G fingers on each 

 hand, and 6 toes on each foot, we should probably have taken to using, like the 

 carpenter, the more convenient system of duodecimals. 



These are examples of the facts which tentl to show that man's early way of 

 counting was upon his fingers; as Massieu, the Abbe Sicard's celebrated deaf 

 and dumb pupil, records in describing his recollections of his yet uneducated 

 childhood : "I knew the numbers before my instruction ; my fingers had taught 

 me them. I did not know the ciphers. I counted on my fingers." Among the 

 lower races, the use of word language has only to a small extent encroached 

 upon gesture language .in counting ; among races above these, numeral words 

 are more largely used, but preserve evident traces of a growth out of gesture 

 counting ; while among the higher peoples, though language gives little trace of 

 the original signification of numerals, there still prevails the sj'stem of counting 

 by fives, tens, and twenties, of which we can hardly doubt that the norm is given 

 by the arrangement of the fingers and toes. Thus it appears that in the mental 

 history of mankind w'e may see back to a condition so much lower than our own, 

 that the numerals, which wo look upon as so settled a part of speech that we 

 use them as one of the first tests of the common derivation of languages, were 

 still unspoken, and their })urpose was served by the ruder, visible signs which 

 belong to the department of gesture. 



II. The next argument to bo brought forward belongs to a very dificrent 

 province of thought, and touches on the early opinions of mankind as to the 

 nature and habits of spiritual beings. It is well known that the lower races of 

 mankind account for the facts and events of the outer world by ascribing a sort 

 of human life and personality to animals, and even to plants, rocks, streams, 

 winds, the sun and stars, and so on through the phenomena of nature. It is 

 also known that a low stratum of the religion of the world consists in belief in, 

 and adoration of, spiritual beings who inhabit the winds and trees and streams, 

 who preside over the ripening of fruits and the falling of rain, give success in 

 war, or inflict disease or misfortune on the savage hunter. Thus the Mintira, a 

 low tribe on the Malayan peninsula, ascribe every ailment that happens to them 

 to a spirit or hantu. One causes smallpox, another brings swelling and inflam- 

 mation in hands and feet, another causes the blood to flow from wounds; indeed, 

 to enumerate all these hantus would be to give a list of all their known ailments. 



