The foregoing examples will show with considerable fulness the wide dispersion of the quinary scale.  Every part of the world contributes its share except Europe, where the only exceptions to the universal use of the decimal system are the half-dozen languages, which still linger on its confines, whose number base is the vigesimal.  Not only is there no living European tongue possessing a quinary number system, but no trace of this method of counting is found in any of the numerals of the earlier forms of speech, which have now become obsolete.  The only possible exceptions of which I can think are the Greek [Greek:  pempazein], to count by fives, and a few kindred words which certainly do hint at a remote antiquity in which the ancestors of the Greeks counted on their fingers, and so grouped their units into fives.  The Roman notation, the familiar I., II., III., IV. (originally IIII.), V., VI., etc., with equal certainty suggests quinary counting, but the Latin language contains no vestige of anything of the kind, and the whole range of Latin literature is silent on this point, though it contains numerous references to finger counting.  It is quite within the bounds of possibility that the prehistoric nations of Europe possessed and used a quinary numeration.  But of these races the modern world knows nothing save the few scanty facts that can be gathered from the stone implements which have now and then been brought to light.  Their languages have perished as utterly as have the races themselves, and speculation concerning them is useless.  Whatever their form of numeration may have been, it has left no perceptible trace on the languages by which they were succeeded.  Even the languages of northern and central Europe which were contemporary with the Greek and Latin of classical times have, with the exception of the Celtic tongues of the extreme North-west, left behind them but meagre traces for the modern student to work on.  We presume that the ancient Gauls and Goths, Huns and Scythians, and other barbarian tribes had the same method of numeration that their descendants now have; and it is a matter of certainty that the decimal scale was, at that time, not used with the universality which now obtains; but wherever the decimal was not used, the universal method was vigesimal; and that the quinary ever had anything of a foothold in Europe is only to be guessed from its presence to-day in almost all of the other corners of the world.

From the fact that the quinary is that one of the three natural scales with the smallest base, it has been conjectured that all tribes possess, at some time in their history, a quinary numeration, which at a later period merges into either the decimal or the vigesimal, and thus disappears or forms with one of the latter a mixed system.[323] In support of this theory it is urged that extensive regions which now show nothing but decimal counting were, beyond all reasonable doubt, quinary.  It is well known, for example, that the decimal system of the Malays has spread over almost the entire Polynesian region, displacing whatever native scales it encountered.  The same phenomenon has been observed in Africa, where the Arab traders have disseminated their own numeral system very widely, the native tribes adopting it or modifying their own scales in such a manner that the Arab influence is detected without difficulty.