EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



tion. Among many South American Indians, 

 as Azara tells us, the language changes from 

 clan to clan, and almost from hut to hut, so that 

 members of different families are obliged to 

 have recourse to gestures to eke out the scanty 

 pittance of oral discourse that is mutually intel- 

 ligible. In the northern part of Celebes, " in a 

 district about one hundred miles long by thirty 

 miles wide, not less than ten distinct languages 

 are spoken." l In civilized speech no words stick 

 like the simple numerals : we use the same words 

 to-day, in counting from one to ten, that our an- 

 cestors used in central Asia ages before the 

 winged bulls of Nineveh were sculptured ; and 

 the change in pronunciation has been barely suf- 

 ficient to disguise the identity. But in the lan- 

 guage of Tahiti four of the ten simple numerals 

 used in Captain Cook's time have already be- 

 come extinct : 



" Two was rua ; it is now piti. 



Four was ha ,- it is now maha. 



Five was rima ; it is now pae. 



Six was ono ; it is novffeae." 2 



Out of many facts that might be cited, these 

 must suffice. The facility with which savage 

 tongues abandon old expressions for new has 

 no parallel in civilized languages, unless it be in 

 some of the more ephemeral kinds of slang. It 



1 Miiller, Science of Language, 6th ed. ii. 36. 

 8 Op. cit. 28. 



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