GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED-THE CULTURE GIVEN BY SCIENCE. 
59 
the use of steam to the blowing of whistles. Compare 10 and .01, or a 
few English sentences with their Latin translations. 
Like the Hindoo discovery of the zero and consequent modern arith¬ 
metic is the organic use of position in language as typified by English. 
Again, the number-system of every child is at first one , two , many. 
The third number, the indefinite, takes different forms, “some,” “a 
few,” “a lot,” etc. But the mental step from knowing two up to know¬ 
ing three, recognizing a class or aggregate as just exactly possessing the 
distinctive quality three , as being triple or a triplet, is a slow and long 
and difficult step. 
In the high-bred, smart American child this step represents roughly a 
whole year’s development, which can not be much hastened. 
Now just this child stage with the enormously undue importance which 
it attaches to the number two is represented by the whole Greek language 
and grammar. 
This speech has an entire system of grammatical forms, called duals, 
whose creation rests wholly on the baby-mistake, the child-misconception 
about two. To babies and to Greek grammar tivo is still a god in a trinity. 
A modern writer speaks slightingly of “the apeing and prolonged caw 
called grammar, the cackling of the human hen over the egg of lan¬ 
guage;” but ma}' not the laborious puerilities which have so long passed 
current as Latin and Greek grammar be of interest to the scientist in 
comparative child study? 
“A single scientific idea may germinate into a hundred arts.” 
