Number-Forms 89
the wedge-shaped phalanx of wild ducks and the huge globe of soaring storks are as remarkable as any.
I used to be much amused during past travels in watching the different lines of search that were pursued by different persons in looking for objects lost on the ground, when the encampment was being broken up. Different persons had decided idiosyncracies, so much so that if their travelling line of sight could have scored a mark on the ground, I think the system of each person would have been as characteristic as his NumberForm.
Children learn their figures to some extent by those on the clock. I cannot, however, trace the influence of the clock on the Forms in more than a few cases. In two of them the clock-face actually appears, in others it has evidently had a strong influence, and in the rest its influence is indicated, but nothing more. I suppose that the complex Roman numerals in the clock do not fit in sufficiently well with the simpler ideas based upon the Arabic ones.
The other traces of the origin of the Forms that appear here and there, are dominoes, cards, counters, an abacus, the fingers, counting by coins, feet and inches (a yellow carpenter’s’ rule appears in one case with 56 in large figures upon it), the country surrounding the child’s home, with its hills and dales, objects in the garden (one scientific man sees the old garden walk and the numeral 7 at a tub sunk in the ground where his father filled his watering-pot). Some associations seem connected with the objects spoken of in the doggerel verses by which children are often taught their numbers.
But the paramount influence proceeds from the names of the numerals. Our nomenclature is perfectly barbarous, and that of other civilised nations is not better than ours, and frequently worse, as the French “quatre-vingt dix-huit,” or " four score, ten and eight,” instead of eightyeight. We speak of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc., in defiance of the beautiful system of decimal notation in which we write those numbers. What we see is one-naught, one-one, one-two, etc., and we should pronounce on that principle, with this proviso, that the word for the “one" having to show both the place and the value,’ should have a sound suggestive of “one” but not identical with it. Let us suppose it to be the
