114 



Pauw, and some other equally systematic writers, 

 according to whom no indigenous nation of the 

 new continent knows how to reckon in its own 

 idiom above three*. We are at present ac- 

 quainted with the numerical systems of forty 

 American languages, and the work of Abbe* Her- 

 vas alone, the Arithmetic of all Nations, ex- 

 hibits near thirty. In studying these different 

 languages we observe, that, when nations rise 

 above their first rude state, their farther progress 

 establishes scarcely any sensible difference in 

 their manner of expressing quantities. The Pe- 

 ruvians had at least as much skill as the Greeks 

 and Romans, in denoting in their language 

 numbers of several millions ; they had even, in 

 order to express a million, a single word, not com- 

 pounded, hunu, to which*the idioms of the old 

 world offer no one analogous. Hue, one ; iscay, 



two ; qimga, three ; chunca, ten ; chuc 



himiyoc, eleven ; chunca iscayniyoc, twelve ;■ 



iscay chunca, twenty ; qimga chunca, thirty ; 



tahua chunca, forty ; — pachac, a hundred ; 



iscaypachac, two hundred ; huaranca, one 



thousand ; iscay -huaranca, two thousand ; 



chuncahuaranca, ten thousand ; iscay-chunca- 

 huaranca, twenty thousand ; pachachuaranca, a 

 hundred thousand ; hunu, a million ; iscay hunu, 



* Rtchtnhts Philosophiques sur les Anrericains, Part 5, 

 sect. 1, torn. 2, p. 162 (ed. of 1769). 



