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.

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 posse