Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more rudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs for the purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the careful attention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languages of their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principles which the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stamp as of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the most stimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language in the second volume of E.J. Payne's _History of the New World called America_; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to compare the conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Levy-Bruhl is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of languages, in his recent work, _Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieures_ ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies"). If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were asked to say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he would be pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary would be very small, and in the second place that it would consist of very short, comprehensive terms--roots, in fact--such as "man," "bear," "eat," "kill," and so on. Nothing of the sort is actually the case. Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he" or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four syllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency of true thought.