Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/344

332 to form these general concepts; it is impossible to think of them in their proper relations to one another, and thus there is at once imperfect knowledge of the external world on the one hand, and on the other, through lack of the bond of likenesses between classes, that comparative slowness of mental processes which must have been a character of all early thought. The more imperfect, in fact, are the links of likeness which binds concepts together, the more the mind tends to resemble the confusion of an unclassified library, where the needed volume can be obtained only by great expenditure of time and effort; the more complete is mental segregation, the more the mind may be said to resemble the same library properly classified. Ascent, therefore, from the knowing of things by their superficial characters to knowledge of them also in their fundamental characters enormously increases, not only the ends reached by thought, but also the ease and rapidity of mental operations.

There is another economy to be noted in mental operations—the economy wrought by the increasing content and the growing symbolism of the concept. The name first given to any object simply expresses the most prominent out of a very small number of qualities by which we know that object. In onomatopoetic words, for example, the quality perceived and named is one of sound, and the process gives rise to such terms as kolokol, the Russian word for "bell"; gunguma, the Gallas name for "drum"; kwalalkwalal, used for "bell" by the natives of Yakama (North America); tumtum, also a Gallas word, meaning "workman," or, more literally, "hammerer"; krakra, the name of a Dahoman watchman's rattle; chacha, the Aino word for "to saw"; the Peruvian ccaccaccahay, signifying "thunderstorm"; the Australian bungbungween, used for "thunder"; hou-hou-hou-gitcha, the Botocudo word for "to suck"; kakakkaka, which in Dyak means "to go on laughing loudly"; shiriushiriukanni, used by the Ainos in the sense of "a rasp"; and the Quichua chiuiuiuinichi, indicating the noise made by the wind among trees. At first, that is to say, the name means no more than the most prominent character, and perhaps the only known character, of the object to which it is applied, whether that character be one of sound, of acting, or of appearance; but, as men come to learn more of the qualities and relations of such object, the name gradually loses its descriptive value, and becomes a mere symbol or word counter for the total content of the concept. Thus, "the Russian called the duck utka because he saw it plunge its beak into the water; the Pole called it kaczka, because he noticed that it waddled in walking; the Bosnian gave it the name of plovka, because he saw it swimming"; yet in their survival none of these terms for the duck retain or even suggest the character which originally gave