USE OF NUMBERS. 
91 
counted ten manotinis, which they called a Re hit, 
or one hundred thousand. Advancing still farther, 
they counted ten rehus, which they called an In , 
which was ten hundred thousand, or one million. 
They had no higher number than the iu, or mil¬ 
lion : they could, however, by means of the above 
terms or combinations, enumerate, with facility, 
tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or 
hundreds of thousands of millions. 
The precision, regularity, and extent of their 
numbers has often astonished me; and how a 
people, having, comparatively speaking, but little 
necessity to use calculation, and being destitute of 
knowledge of figures, should have originated and 
matured such a system, is still wonderful, and ap¬ 
pears, more than any other fact, to favour the opi¬ 
nion that these islands were peopled from a country 
whose inhabitants were highly civilized. 
Many of their numerals are precisely the same 
as those used by the people of several of the 
Asiatic islands, and also in the remote and popu¬ 
lous island of Madagascar. Occasionally the 
islanders double the number, by simply counting 
two instead of one. This is frequently practised 
in counting fish, bread-fruit, or cocoa-nuts, and is 
called double counting, by which all the above 
terms signify twice as large a number as is now 
affixed to them. 
In counting, they usually employ a piece of the 
stalk of the cocoa-nut leaf, putting one aside for 
every ten, and gathering them up, and putting a 
longer one aside for every rau, or hundred. The 
natives of most of the islands, adults and children, 
appear remarkably fond of figures and calculations, 
and receive the elements of arithmetic with great 
facility, and seeming delight. 
