832 PRIMITIVE NUMBERS [ETH, ANN. 19 
is crystallized in a characteristically and often chaotically elaborate 
grammar, well suited to the formulation and utterance of a limited 
number of ideas representing a few main classes (or lines) of thought, 
and well adapted to maintaining the associative thought habit; so that 
primitive languages are essentially structural or morphologic, only 
incidentally lexie. With the multiplication of ideas accompanying 
cultural advance, the bonds of linguistic association break under their 
own weight, and discrete yocables multiply at the expense of unwieldy 
collocations; and with the attainment of writing, the function of lin- 
guistic association largely disappears, and speech becomes essentially 
lexic, only incidentally morphologic. 
Concordantly with self-centered language, primitive arts and indus- 
tries are conspicuously egoistic. The most strikingly inchoate esthetic 
thus far critically studied is the totemic face-paint borne by the ma- 
trons of clans, apparently as beacon-signals analogous to the face-marks 
of yarious animals,’ while the tattoo-marks denoting marriage among 
the women of many Amerind tribes are clear vestiges of the more 
primitive beacons; and the autobiographic winter count of the warrior 
and the closely related calendar of the shaman are commonly egocen- 
tric, never more than ethnocentric—for if the motives of the primitive 
scribe perchance transcend self, they never outpass the clan or tribe, 
or at most the confederacy. Similarly the industrial devices of early 
culture are held to absorb and retain a part of the personality of, and 
indeed to become subjective appendages to, their makers and users; 
while in advancing culture the subjective personality of the device 
passes over into the industries in such wise as to engender guilds and 
crafts, and ultimately to grow into the ‘ 
tional apprenticeship. 
Concordantly, too, egocentric thought finds expression in primitive 
belief; for the individual long retains his personal tutelary or fetish, 
endowing it with characters revealing his own subjectivity; and it is 
art and mystery” of conyen- 
with exceeding slowness that he rises first to the recognition of family 
fetishes and clan totems, and eventually to the inheritance, or perhaps 
as among the Kwakiutl Indians to the conjugal acquisition, of those 
symbols of potency, and much later that he rises to that recognition 
of alien tutelaries which expands with piratical and amicabic «ccultu- 
ration, and ends in pantheism. 
So in every line of human activity self-centered thinking is crys- 
tallized by custom, and the thought and custom interact with cumu- 
lative effect in dominating the primitive mind well into the upper 
strata of prescriptorial life. The persistence of the cumulative effect 
is clearly indicated by numberless vestiges of egocentric cosmology 
clinging often to the higher phases of Aryan culture. 
1Cf. The Seri (ndians: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1898, part 1, 
p. 168. 
