pean
traveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract from
natives any coherent account of their system of relationships; for
his questions are apt to take the form of "Can a man marry his deceased
wife's sister?" or what not. Such generalities do not enter at all
into the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribe
imposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very forms
of his speech. The so-called "genealogical method" initiated by Dr.
Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, rests
mainly on the use of a concrete type 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