of procedure corresponding to the mental habits of the simple folk under investigation.  John, whom you address here, can tell you exactly whether he may, or may not, marry Mary Anne over there; also he can point out his mother, and tell you her name, and the names of his brothers and sisters.  You work round the whole group—­it very possibly contains no more than a few hundred members at most—­and interrogate them one and all about their relationships to this and that individual whom you name.  In course of time you have a scheme which you can treat in your own analytic way to your heart’s content; whilst against your system of reckoning affinity you can set up by way of contrast the native system; which can always be obtained by asking each informant what relationship-terms he would apply to the different members of his pedigree, and, reciprocally, what terms they would each apply to him.

* * * * *

Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast and intricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression of ideas of number.  It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages have no sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller, compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalent for our numerals, say from 5 to 10.  The fact is that the numerical interest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with other interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which our own type of language affords no key at all.  Thus in the island of Kiwai, at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition found a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjects acting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretely specified.  To indicate the action of two on many in the past, they said rudo, in the present durudo; of many on many in the past rumo, in the present durumo; of two on two in the past, amarudo, in the present amadurudo; of many on two in the past amarumo; of many on three in the past ibidurumo, of many on three in the present ibidurudo; of three on two in the present, amabidurumo, of three on two in the past, amabirumo, and so on.  Meanwhile, words to serve the purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands and feet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating, but likewise of communicating, a number.  It is the one case in which gesture-language can claim something like an independent status by the side of speech.