07 Dec




















our simplest measures of length are shown by their names to have been measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit, the foot, and the like, and therefore to date from a time when exactness was not required. To add another out of many examples, it is found to-day that various rude nations go through the simplest arithmetical processes by means of pebbles. Into our own language, through the Latin, has come a word showing that our distant progenitors reckoned in this way: the word CALCULATE gives us an absolute proof of this. According to the theory of the Duke of Argyll, men ages ago used pebbles (CALCULI) in performing the simplest arithmetical calculations because we to-day "CALCULATE." No reduction to absurdity could be more thorough. The simple fact must be that we "calculate" because our remote ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic. Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among peoples of a low culture to-day childish modes of viewing nature, and childish ways of expressing the relations of man to nature, such as clearly survive from a remote ancestry; noteworthy among these are the beliefs in witches and fairies, and multitudes of popular and poetic expressions in the most civilized nations. So, too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, shows in contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love of playthings and games, of which we have many survivals. All these facts, which were at first unobserved or observed as matters of no significance, have been brought into connection with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all important schools; by Agassiz on one hand and by Darwin on the other--namely, as stated by Agassiz, that "the young states of each species and group resemble older forms of the same

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