If a savage expresses the number 3 by the combination 2-1, it will at once be suspected that his numerals will, by the time he reaches 10 or 20, become so complex and confused that numbers as high as these will be expressed by finger pantomime rather than by words.

Such is often the case; and the comment is frequently made by explorers that the tribes they have visited have no words for numbers higher than 3, 4, 5, 10, or 20, but that counting is carried beyond that point by the aid of fingers or other objects.

So reluctant, in many cases, are savages to count by words, that limits have been assigned for spoken numerals, which subsequent investigation proved to fall far short of the real extent of the number systems to which they belonged.

One of the south-western Indian tribes of the United States, the Comanches, was for a time supposed to have no numeral words below 10, but to count solely by the use of fingers.

But the entire scale of this taciturn tribe was afterward discovered and published.
To illustrate the awkward and inconvenient forms of expression which abound in primitive numeral nomenclature, one has only to draw from such scales as those of the Zuni, or the Point Barrow Eskimos, given in the last chapter.