This apparent wealth soon becomes an embarrassment and an encumbrance. Instead of 100 distinct terms, one generic substantive, plus one or two epithets, would suffice. But the _substantive_ was not born of the deliberate desire to obviate this inconvenience. It is a specialisation, a limitation of the primitive meaning. Little by little the adjective lost its qualificative value, to become the name of one of the objects qualified. Thus in Sanskrit _dêva_ (shining) finally signified the god; _sourya_ (the dazzling) became the sun; _akva_ (rapid) the name of a horse, etc. This metamorphosis of adjective into substantive by a specialisation of the general sense occurs even in our actual languages; as, e. g., when we say in French _un brilliant_ (diamond); _le volant_ (of a machine); _un bon_ (of bread, counting-house, bank, etc.). What is only an accident now was originally a constant process.[60] Thus the substantive was derived from the primitive adjective; or rather, within the primitive organism, adjective-substantive, a division has been produced, and two grammatical functions constituted. Many other remarks could be made on the determination of the substantive by inflexions, declensions, the mark of the gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); I shall confine myself to what concerns _number_, since we are proposing to consider numeration under all its aspects. Nothing appears more natural and clear-cut than the distinction between one and several; as soon as we exceed pure unity, the mother of numbers, plurality appears to us to be homogeneous in all its degrees. It has not been so from the beginning. This is proved by the existence of the dual in an enormous number of languages: Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Hottentot, Australian, etc. One, two, were counted with precision; the rest was vague. According to Sayce, the word “three” in Aryan language at first signified “what goes beyond.” It has been supposed that the dual was at first applied to the paired parts of the body: the eyes, the arms, the legs. Intellectual progress caused it to fall into disuse. At the close of the period of first formation which we have been considering, the sentence was only a defaced organism reproduced by one of the following forms: (1) that; (2) that shining; (3) that sun, that shining.[61] The verb is still absent. With it we enter on the period of secondary formation. It was long held to be an indisputable dogma that the _verb_ is the word _par excellence_ (_verbum_), the necessary and exclusive instrument of an affirmation. Yet there are many inferior idioms which dispense with it, and express affirmation by crude, roundabout processes, with no precision,—most frequently by a juxtaposition: snow white = the snow is white; drink me wine = I drink (or shall drink) wine, etc. Plenty of examples can be found in special works.