In getting down, then, to the language of primitive man we are obliged to divest the root forms of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine them to their physical meanings. In dealing with the languages of the least advanced existing tribes of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. The language of the mind with them has not yet begun its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged. It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for "striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less than thirteen distinct words. All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of growth.