A continued use of the trading and
bargaining faculties must and does result in a familiarity with numbers
sufficient to enable savages to perform unexpected feats in reckoning.
Among some of the West African tribes this has actually been found to be
the case; and among the Yorubas of Abeokuta[49] the extraordinary saying,
"You may seem very clever, but you can't tell nine times nine," shows how
surprisingly this faculty has been developed, considering the general
condition of savagery in which the tribe lived. There can be no doubt that,
in general, the growth of the number sense keeps pace with the growth of
the intelligence in other respects. But when it is remembered that the
Tonga Islanders have numerals up to 100,000, and the Tembus, the Fingoes,
the Pondos, and a dozen other South African tribes go as high as 1,000,000;
and that Leigh Hunt never could learn the multiplication table, one must
confess that this law occasionally presents to our consideration remarkable
exceptions.
While considering the extent of the savage's arithmetical knowledge, of his
ability to count and to grasp the meaning of number, it may not be amiss to
ask ourselves the question, what is the extent of the development of our
own number sense? To what limit can we absorb the idea of number, with a
complete appreciation of the idea of the number of units involved in any
written or spoken quantity? Our perfect system of numeration enables us to
express without difficulty any desired number, no matter how great or how
small it be.
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