For the rest, it does not follow that the mind fails to appreciate numerical relations, because the tongue halts in the matter of symbolizing them abstractly.  A certain high official, when presiding over the Indian census, was informed by a subordinate that it was impossible to elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account of the number of their huts, for the simple and sufficient reason that they could not count above three.  The director, who happened to be a man of keen anthropological insight, had therefore himself to come to the rescue.  Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a stone on the ground, saying to one “This is your hut,” and to another “This is your hut,” as he placed a second stone a little way from the first.  “And now where is yours?” he asked a third.  The natives at once entered into the spirit of the game, and in a short time there was plotted out a plan of the whole settlement, which subsequent verification proved to be both geographically and numerically correct and complete.  This story may serve to show how nature supplies man with a ready reckoner in his faculty of perception, which suffices well enough for the affairs of the simpler sort of life.  One knows how a shepherd can take in the numbers of a flock at a glance.  For the higher flights of experience, however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of grasping the meaning of things.  Moreover, since thinking is little more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself, to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on the road to the analytic mode of intelligence—­the mode of thinking by distinct concepts.

If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it is the duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave them their old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicial to their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one’s home-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yet this consideration hardly applies at all to the native language.  If the tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for the good of all concerned.  It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongst anthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savage and the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respect to their power of general intelligence.  If by power we are to understand sheer potentiality, I know of no sufficient evidence that enables us to say whether, under ideal conditions, the average degree of mental capacity would in the two cases prove the same or different.  But I am sure that the ordinary peasant of Europe, whose society provides him, in the shape of an analytic language, with a ready-made