individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary, before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to a quantitative equality or comparability. There are indeed some instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak, a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten, as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike, and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first, perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10. We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses' he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all' or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still in the bonds of sense. It is not a synthetic category, but only a material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of its own,--not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals. Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep, or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey).