120 REPORT—1868, 
On the Pectorales Muscles. By Professor G. Rotreston, M.D., F.R.S. 
On the Physiology of Pain. By Professor G. Rotixston, M.D., F.R.S. 
Additional Researches on the Asymmetry of the Pleuronectide. 
By Professor Traquair. 
On the Seat of the Faculty of Articulate Languages. 
By Professor Pavt Broca. 
The Physiology of Language. By Dr. Huenriyes Jackson, 
On sixteen Eskimo Crania. By Professor Groner Rotieston, W.D., F.R.S. 
Remarks on Language and Mythology as Departments of Biological Science. 
By Evwarp B. Tytor. 
The treatment of accounts of the civilization of tribes of man as details of local 
geography is connected with a popular notion that these topics are finally disposed 
of by descriptive treatment; and this notion, in the writer’s opinion, is prevalent 
enough to be a serious obstacle to knowledge. Thus it is far from being a trivial 
matter of classification that details of human culture should come under discussion as 
topics of biology, where, if they have any claim to attention, they must be treated 
as facts to ke classified and referred to uniform and consistent laws. To show that 
the phenomena of civilization, in spite of their extreme difficulty and complexity, 
are amenable to such treatment as would be applicable to other biological investiga- 
tions in which law and order are to be sought for throughout masses of multifarious 
details, was the object of the present paper. Certain special points of culture 
taken from language and mythology, were brought forward to show how the no- 
tion of arbitrary causeless spontaneity in human action disappears when phenomena 
are classified in their proper groups. In examining the different languages of man- 
kind abundant traces are found of the art of counting by word-numbers having 
grown up from that primitive plan of counting on the fingers still so familiar to 
mankind, Again, as savages have reckoned on their fingeis and toes, it appears to 
have struck them that their words for finger, hand, foot, &c. might be used to ex- 
press numbers. Thus the Polynesians form the word hima, 7. e. “hand,” into a 
numeral meaning 5. Thus the Caribs haye made words expressing “ band,” “ both 
hands,” “ feet and hands,” into numerals equivalent to 5, 10, 20. Even among the 
rude nations of West Australia, who are usually found to possess no numeral be- 
yond 2 or 3, the formation of hand-numerals has locally broken out, as they haye 
been found to use the expression marh-jin-bang-ga, or “ half the hands,” for 5, and 
thence to count on to 15, which they call “‘the hand on either side and half the 
feet.” The immense series of facts of which these are illustrative exemplify the 
uniform results of a similar process of mental development which has occurred 
again and again among remote and savage tribes. As a second instance of such 
uniformity, examples were quoted from among a large number of the languages of 
the world, in which the interjections of affirmation and negation display a remark- 
able tendency to fall into vowels, mute or aspirated, as aye, ii, hi, &c. for “ yes,” 
and into labials, as aan, nant, &e. for “no.” Thirdly, the repeated occurrence in 
remote and disconnected languages of the practice of “differentiating” by vowels 
pronouns and adverbs of distance, is to be ascribed to the uniform action of simi- 
lar processes. Of this a single instance may be quoted from the Jayan language, 
which distinguishes *ki=this (close by), *ha=that (at some distance), cku=that 
