Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/723

 654 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s„ i, 1899

six, sometimes doubling two to make four or three to make six, and in other ways revealing a quasi binary system, though both Curr and Conant opine that " no Australian in his wild state could ever count intelligently to 7 " * ; certain Brazilian tribes are also described as counting only to two, three, or four, usually with an additional term for many; while the Tasmanians counted commonly to two and sometimes to four, and were able to reach five by the addition of one to the limital number."

The analogy between the counting of the tribesmen and that of the animals is not so close as the bare records suggest, since the descriptions of the tribal reckoning relate to systems of vocal numeration rather than to actual ability in discrimination and enu- meration ; moreover, most of the tribesmen reveal the germ of notation in the use of sticks, notches, knotted cords, and the like to make tangible the numerical values, something which lower animals never do so far as known. Actually the savages, even those of lowliest culture, habitually count to or above three, as shown by the plurality of plurals and other features of their speech; and the meagernessof their numeration no more negates numerical capacity than does the absence of such systems among counting crows and foxes and wasps. Nevertheless, the com- parison is instructive ; in the first place, it indicates roughly cor- responding ability to count on the part of higher animals and lower men ; it also defines the origin of vocal numeration at the bottom of the scale of human development ; and it is especially significant in demonstrating that neither the animals nor the men either (1) cognize quinary and decimal systems, or (2) use their own external organs (toes, fingers, etc.) as mechanical adjuncts to nascent notation — unless the binary numeration of certain Aus- tralian tribes is really bimanual, as W. E. Roth implies.* Many

1 The Number Concept, by L. L. Conant, 1896, p. 27 ; The Australian Race, by E. M. Curr, 1886, vol. I, p. 32.


 * The Aborigines of Tasmania, by H. Ling Roth, 1890, p. 147.

1897, p. 2.
 * Ethnological Studies among the North- West-Central Queensland Aborigines,

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