a disease. Müller’s characterization, though more poetic than scientific, is yet a legitimate trope. In the evolution of language old words are used with new meanings, and often the old meanings fade while the new meanings become standard, which seems to be at variance with the etymological signification of the terms. Primitive languages absorb the entire assertion in one word; their words are holophrastic; a single word performs the offices of all the parts of speech, for parts of speech are yet undifferentiated; therefore, a word is a complete sentence. When words are sentence words, the phenomena which men attempt to describe with them are expressed in such terms that linguistic development leads to a cosmology of space.
In this manner primitive man is led to speak of seven elements of space. There are the here, the center, the midworld; the zenith, the above, the heaven world; the down, the lower world, the nadir, the hell. The apparent rising of the sun in the east and its apparent course to the west seem to divide the plane of the earth into two parts. In speaking about the east, the eastern direction, the eastern land gradually becomes an eastern world; and in speaking about the west, the western direction, the western land, it gradually becomes the western world. Then, as men must still talk about the north and the south as distinct from the east and the west, they also become worlds. Thus we have the cardinal worlds; these with the midworld, the zenith world, and the nadir world constitute the seven worlds of the cosmology of savagery.
The seven worlds are universal; every savage and every barbaric tribe recognizes and believes in them, as they are inexorably developed as notions in the mind through the power of the language used to express thought about relations of space, especially as it refers to commonplace geography. Every day the savage man has to tell of his wandering or the wanderings of others over the surface of the earth, or to give directions to others how to find places and objects, so that in this use of holophrastic terms
