THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 353 



Standing that the latter may all be most nearly related 

 together, and severally named by as many denotative 

 signs : even with their numberless already-formed words 

 for different kinds of trees, the aborigines of Tasmania 

 could not designate "a tree." Of course they must have 

 had a recept of a tree, or a generic image formed out of 

 innumerable perceptions of particular trees — so that, for 

 instance, it would doubtless have surprised a Tasmanian 

 could he have seen a tree (even though it were a new 

 species for which he had no name) standing inverted 

 with its roots in the air and its branches in the ground. 

 In just the same way a dog is surprised when it first 

 sees a man walking on his hands : the dog will bark at 

 such an object because it conflicts with the generic image 

 which has been automatically formed by numberless percep- 

 tions of individual men walking on their feet. But, in the 

 absence of any name for trees in general, there is nothing 

 to show that the savage has a concept answering to " tree," 

 any more than that the dog has a concept answering to " man." 

 Indeed, unless my opponents vacate the basis of Nominalism 

 on which their opposition is founded, they must acknowledge 

 that in the absence of any name for tree there can be no 

 conception of tree. 



So much, then, for what Archdeacon Farrar has called 

 « the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction " in savages. 

 Their various languages unite, in verbal testimony, to assure 

 us that human thought does not " proceed from the abstract 

 to the concrete ; " but, on the contrary, that in the race, as 

 in the individual, receptual ideation is the precursor of con- 

 ceptual — denotation the antecedent of denomination, as in still 

 earlier stages it was itself preceded by gesticulation. Such 

 being the case with regard to names, it is no wonder, as 

 we previously found, that low savages are so extraordinarily 

 deficient in their forms of predication. 



The palaeontology of human thought, then, as recorded 

 in language, incontestibly proves that the origin and progress 



2 A 



