288 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. ii. 



tlie godlike intellect evidently will not apply here. If the 

 emotions of the German and his intellectual perceptions of 

 the fitness of harmonious sounds for expressing emotion are 

 so deep and subtle and varied as to result in the production 

 of choruses like those of Handel and symphonies like those 

 of Beethoven, on the other hand the crude emotions of the 

 Australian are quite adequately expressed by the discordant 

 yells and howls which constitute the sole kind of music ap- 

 preciable by his undeveloped ears. We look in vain here for 

 traces of the keen aesthetic sense which in a measure links 

 together our intellectual and moral natures. Again, if the 

 American student has been known to be actuated by such 

 noble ethical impulses and guided by such lofty conceptions 

 of morality as to leave his comfortable home and his 



them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is to an 

 English school-boy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand 

 reiiiLiins to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units. Yet they 

 seldom lose oxen ; the way in which they discover the loss of one is not by 

 the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they 

 know. When bartering is going on, each slieep must be paid for separately. 

 Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheeji, 

 it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks. 

 I have done so, and seen a man put two of the sticks apart, and take a sight 

 over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself 

 that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two 

 sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would 

 be afflicted with doubts ; the transaction seemed to come out too ' pat ' to be 

 correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks ; and then his 

 mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and 

 he broke olf the transaction until two sticks were jjut into his hand, and one 

 sheep driven away, aud then the other two sticks given him, and the second 

 sheep driven away. . . . Once while I watched a Dammara floundering 

 hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, 

 equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half-a-dozen of her 

 new-born puppies, which had iaeen removed two or three times from her, and 

 her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or 

 if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and mnning her eyes over them, 

 backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a 

 vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking 

 the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great 

 honour on the man." — Gal ton. Tropical South Africa, p. 132, cited in Lub- 

 bock, Origin of Civilizatiov, Amer. ed., p. 294. See also Tylor, Primitive 

 Culture, vol. i. pp. 218 — 246. Probably the dual number, in grammar, 

 " preserves the memorial of that stage of thought wheu all beyoud two was 

 an idea of indefinite number." Id. p. 240. 



