We are not, after all, so very much better off than the child who, with his arms about his mother's neck, informs her with perfect gravity and sincerity that he "loves her a million bushels." His idea is merely of some very great amount, and our own is often but little clearer when we use the expressions which are so easily represented by a few digits.

Among the uneducated portions of civilized communities the limit of clear comprehension of number is not only relatively, but absolutely, very low.

Travellers in 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.