superior race are grafted on the language of the inferior, Captain Grant describes the native slaves of Equatorial Africa occupying their lounging hours in learning the numerals of their Arab masters.[1] Father Dobrizhoffer's account of the arithmetical relations between the native Brazilians and the Jesuits is a good description of the intellectual contact between savages and missionaries. The Guaranis, it appears, counted up to 4 with their native numerals, and when they got beyond, they would say 'innumerable.' 'But as counting is both of manifold use in common life, and in the confessional absolutely indispensable in making a complete confession, the Indians were daily taught at the public catechising in the church to count in Spanish. On Sundays the whole people used to count with a loud voice in Spanish, from 1 to 1,000.' The missionary, it is true, did not find the natives use the numbers thus learnt very accurately 'We were washing at a blackamoor,' he says.[2] If, however, we examine the modern vocabularies of savage or low barbarian tribes, they will be found to afford interesting evidence how really effective the influence of higher on lower civilization has been in this matter. So far as the ruder system is complete and moderately convenient, it may stand, but where it ceases or grows cumbrous, and sometimes at a lower limit than this, we can see the cleverer foreigner taking it into his own hands, supplementing or supplanting the scanty numerals of the lower race by his own. The higher race, though advanced enough to act thus on the lower, need not be itself at an extremely high level. Markham observes that the Jivaras of the Marañon, with native numerals up to 5, adopt for higher numbers those of the Quichua, the language of the Peruvian Incas.[3] The cases or the indigenes of India are instructive. The Khonds reckon 1 and 2 in native words, and then take to borrowed
