the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth.  A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance.  And no wonder that the tally mounted up.  For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either “he” or “she”; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four syllables and having no element in common.  Sounds, in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are rare.  Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number.  By means of more or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency of true thought.

For instance, I-cut-bear’s-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-now corresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by the particular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reduced the notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a lot of unnecessary detail—­for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry, doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on.  Well, American languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number of sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau word—­“holophrase” is the technical name for it—­into which is packed away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail, the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the time of the cutting, and who knows what besides.  Amusing examples of such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books.  To go back to the Fuegians, their expression mamihlapinatapai is said to mean “to look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do.”  Now, since exactly the same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never recur either; one could never open one’s mouth without coining a new word.  Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far removed.  Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they register their highly concrete experiences.