36 
would of necessity pass through the same experiences everywhere. 
We may, therefore, expect to find a certain uniformity of psychological 
development, of which the phase of defining ideas by contrasting them 
with their opposites, previously noted, from languages of the Old anu 
New Worlds, may well serve as example. The fact of the separate 
evolution of the different graphic systems from picture writings and 
the adaptation of hieroglyphical symbols as representations of sounds 
in languages of the chief linguistic stock of the world, is evident proof 
that the mental phases continued to develop on the same lines of 
natural development. Professor Sayce tells us that even the highly 
specialised languages of the Semitic family afford traces of a condition 
when the personal pronouns were not verbally differentiated, of the 
existence of a noun of multitude affixed as a sign for plural, and of the 
use of three numbers, the singular, the dual, and the plural for many. 
The names of the numerals in many languages prove them to have 
been formed by the habit of forming the fingers. The decimal system 
of reckoning seems almost universally based on human anatomy. 
Finnish /okka means “to count” and “ten” also. In Tahiti vima was 
once the name for hand and five, and Jama is still used for five in 
Malay. In Zulu five is edesanta or “ finish hand,” and the verb komba 
“to point” means also seven, the number of the index finger. We 
find such combinations as ‘‘ band one” for six ; hands for ten ; two on 
the foot for 12; and 15 is zprtitiret, or whole foot ; mo bande or “a 
person finished” is the word for 20 among the Vei of Africa, and the 
Aztec word for the same number cempoualli signifies one counting. 
Our very distinctions of grammatical gender result from the habit of 
dividing objects and ideas into classes developed alike by the African 
Zulu and the Tinne of America. Such are some of the simple begin- 
nings of language. 
Languages have been classed in various ways. The simplest of all 
methods was, perhaps, that of the Greeks, who divided them into two 
groups. In the first they placed Greek, and in the second all other 
tongues which they called ‘‘ barbarous.” Philologists are, however, 
mainly agreed that there are three great groups into which languages 
generally may be divided, namely, the isolating stage, the agglutinative 
phases, and the inflectional conditions. By some these are regarded as 
successive epochs in the life of language through which each linguistic 
family has passed in some stage of its existence. There are, moreover, 
isolating languages which seem to border on agglutination, and agglu- 
tinative tongues which approach nearly to the inflectional conditions. 
A few, like the Etruscan and the extensive Caucasian family, which 
includes the Georgian, as yet evade strict classification. The mono- 
syllabic Chinese is the best known type of the isolating stage, thus 
named because there are only 450 so-called root-words in this language 
-—450 sounds with more than 40,000 meanings solely produced by 
accent, tone, and the position of the word in the sentence. About 
1,500 of these verbal modifications are in general use ; and 44,500 are 
recorded in the Imperial dictionary of Kang-hi, of which fully one-half 
are obsolete and employed only in the ancient literary language, which 
ean be traced back fully 4,000 years. In the Annamitic dialect of 
Chinese the syllable da has 23 distinct meanings, and it is said the 
