Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/438

416 by any bait, however tempting; the same will be the case, if three enter and two come out, or if four enter and three come out—and so on, till a number is reached which is beyond his arithmetic; till he cannot perceive that one has been left behind, and so is led to venture within reach of the hidden gun, to his destruction. Something very like this would be true of men, without language. Open for the briefest instant a hand with one corn in it, and then again with two, and any one who has an eye can tell the difference; so with two and three, with three and four—and so on, up to a limit which may vary with the quickness of eye and readiness of thought of the counter, results of his natural capacity or of his training, but which is surely reached, and soon. Open the hand, for instance, with twenty corns, then drop one secretly and open it again, and the surest eye that ever looked could not detect the loss. Or put near one another two piles or rows, one of nineteen, the other of twenty, and it would be not less impracticable to distinguish them by immediate apprehension. But here appears the discordance between the human mind and that of the brute. The crow would never find out that the heap of twenty is greater than that of nineteen; the man does it without difficulty: he analyzes or breaks up both into parts, say of four corns each, the numerical value of which he can immediately apprehend, as well as their number; and he at last finds a couple of parts, whereof both he and the crow could see that the one exceeds the other.

In this power of detailed review, analysis, and comparison, now, lies, as I conceive, the first fundamental trait of superiority of man's endowment. But this is not all. This would merely amount to a great and valuable extension of the limits of immediate apprehension; whereas the crow knows well that three corns are more than two corns, man would be able also to satisfy himself, in every actual case which should arise, that twenty corns are more than nineteen corns, or a hundred corns than ninety-nine corns; and he would be able to make an intelligent choice of the larger heap where a crow might cheat himself through ignorance. So much is possible without language, nor would it alone ever lead to