Russia have informed the writer that the peasants of that country have no distinct idea of a number consisting of but a few hundred even. There is no reason to doubt this testimony. The entire life of a peasant might be passed without his ever having occasion to use a number as great as 500, and as a result he might have respecting that number an idea less distinct than a trained mathematician would have of the distance from the earth to the sun. De Quincey[50] incidentally mentions this characteristic in narrating a conversation which occurred while he was at Carnarvon, a little town in Wales. "It was on this occasion," he says, "that I learned how vague are the ideas of number in unpractised minds. 'What number of people do you think,' I said to an elderly person, 'will be assembled this day at Carnarvon?' 'What number?' rejoined the person addressed; 'what number? Well, really, now, I should reckon--perhaps a matter of four million.' Four millions of _extra_ people in little Carnarvon, that could barely find accommodation (I should calculate) for an extra four hundred!" So the Eskimo and the South American Indian are, after all, not so very far behind the "elderly person" of Carnarvon, in the distinct perception of a number which familiarity renders to us absurdly small. CHAPTER III. THE ORIGIN OF NUMBER WORDS. In the comparison of languages and the search for primitive root forms, no class of expressions has been subjected to closer scrutiny than the little cluster of words, found in each language, which constitutes a part of the daily vocabulary of almost every human being--the words with which we begin our counting. It is assumed, and with good reason, that these are among the earlier words to appear in any language; and in the mutations of human speech, they are found to suffer less than almost any other portion of a language. Kinship between tongues remote from each other has in many instances been detected by the similarity found to exist among the every-day words of each; and among these words one may look with a good degree of certainty for the 1, 2, 3, etc., of the number scale. So fruitful has been this line of research, that the attempt has been made, even, to establish a common origin for all the races of mankind by means of a comparison of numeral words.[51] But in this instance, as in so many others that will readily occur to the mind, the result has been that the theory has finally taken possession of the author and reduced him to complete subjugation, instead of remaining his servant and submitting to the legitimate results of patient and careful investigation. Linguistic research is so full of snares and pitfalls that the student must needs employ the greatest degree of discrimination before asserting kinship of race because of resemblances in vocabulary; or even relationship between words in the same language because of some chance likeness of form that may exist between them.