352 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



kinds of washing, without any to indicate "washing" itself;* 

 and Milligan says that the aborigines of Tasmania had 

 " no words representing abstract ideas ; for each variety of 

 gum-tree, wattle-tree, &c., they had a name, but they had 

 no equivalent for the expression of * a tree ; ' neither could 

 they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft, warm, cold, 

 long, short, round." t 



Lastly, to give only one other example, Dr. Latham 

 states that a Kurd of the Zaza tribe, who furnished Dr. 

 Sandwith with a list of native words, was not "able to 

 conceive a hand or father, except so far as they were 

 related to himself, or something else ; and so essentially 

 concrete rather than abstract were his notions, that he 

 combined the pronoun with the substantive whenever he 

 had a part of the human body or a degree of consanguinity 

 to name," saying sere-min, " my head," and pie-min, " my 

 father." 



Thus, as Professor Sayce remarks, after alluding to 

 some of the above facts, "we may be sure that it was not 

 " the ' ideas of prime importance ' which primitive man 

 struggled to represent, but those individual objects of which 

 his senses were cognizant." f And, without further multi- 

 plying testimony, we may now be prepared to accept 

 from him the general statement that, " all over the world, 

 indeed, wherever we come across a savage race, or an 

 individual who has been unaffected by the civilization 

 around him, we find this primitive inability to separate 

 the particular from the universal by isolating the individual 

 word, and extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually 

 associated with it." § Or, in my own phraseology, among 

 all primitive races still existing, we meet with what must 

 seem to my opponents a wholly unintelligible incapacity 

 to evolve a concept from any number of recepts, notwith- 



* Pickering, Indian Languages^ p. 26. 



t Vocabulary of the Dialects of some of the Aboriginal Tribes of Tasmania p. 34, 



X Introduction^ d^c.y vol. ii., p. 6. 



§ Ibid. J vol. L, p. 379. 



