1888. ] 223 (Brinton, 
It is also evident that things were not-thought of, or talked of, 
out of their natural relations. ‘There are still in most American 
tongues large classes of words, such as the parts of the body and 
terms of kinship, which cannot stand alone. ‘They must always be 
accompanied by a pronoun expressing relation. 
Few American tongues have any adjectives, the Cree, for instance, 
not a dozen in all. Prepositions are equally rare, and articles are 
not found. These facts testify that what are called ‘‘the gram- 
were wholly absent in the primitive speech of 
matical categories ”’ 
man. 
So also were those adjectives which are called zumerals. ‘There 
are American tongues which have no words for any numerals what- 
ever. The numerical concepts one, two, three, four, cannot be 
expressed in these languages for lack of terms with any such mean- 
ing.* This was a great puzzle to the missionaries when they under- 
took to expound to their flocks the doctrine of the Trinity. They 
were in worse case even than that missionary to an Oregon tribe, 
who, to convey the notion of sowd to his hearers, could find no- 
word in their language nearer to it than one which meant ‘‘ the 
lower gut.”’ 
A very interesting chapter in the study of these tongues is that 
which reveals the evolution of specific distinctions, those inductive 
generalizations under which primitive man classified the objects of 
the universe about him. These distinctions were either grammatical 
or logical, that is, either formal or material. That most widely 
seen in America is a division of all existences into those which are 
considered living and those considered not living. ‘This consti- 
tutes the second great generalization of the primitive mind, the 
first, as I have said, having been that into Being and Not-being. 
The distinctions of Living and Not-living gave rise to the animate 
and zvanimate conjugations. A grammatical sex distinction, which 
is the prevailing one in the grammars of the Aryan tongues, does 
not exist in any American dialect known to me.f 
It is true that abstract general terms are absent or rare in the 
* A striking example is the Chiquita of Bolivia. ‘‘ No se puede en chiquito, ni contar 
dos, tres, cuatro, ete., ni decir segundo, tercero, etc.’’ Arte y Vocabulario de la Lengua 
Chiquita, p. 19 (Paris, 1880). : 
+ Those distinctions, apparently of sex, called by M. Lucien Adam anthropic and met- 
anthropic, arrhenie and metarrhenic, found in certain American tongues, belong to the 
material, not the formal part of the language, and, strictly speaking, are distinctions not 
really based on sexual considerations. See Adam, Du Genre dans les Diverses Langues 
(Paris, 1888). 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. 800. XXV. 128. 2c. | PRINTED NOY. 24, 1888. 
