Hindi numerals. The Oraon tribes, while belonging to a race of the Dravidian stock, and having had a series of native numerals accordingly, appear to have given up their use beyond 4, or sometimes even 2, and adopted Hindi numerals in their place.[1] The South American Conibos were observed to count 1 and 2 with their own words, and then to borrow Spanish numerals, much as a Brazilian dialect of the Tupi family is noticed in the last century as having lost the native 5, and settled down into using the old native numerals up to 3, and then continuing in Portuguese.[2] In Melanesia, the Annatom language can only count in its own numerals to 5, and then borrows English siks, seven, eet, nain, &c. In some Polynesian islands, though the native numerals are extensive enough, the confusion arising from reckoning by pairs and fours as well as units, has induced the natives to escape from perplexity by adopting huneri and tausani.[3] And though the Esquimaux counting by hands, feet, and whole men, is capable of expressing high numbers, it becomes practically clumsy even when it gets among the scores, and the Greenlander has done well to adopt untrîte and tusinte from his Danish teachers. Similarity of numerals in two languages is a point to which philologists attach great and deserved importance in the question whether they are to be considered as sprung from a common stock. But it is clear that so far as one race may have borrowed numerals from another, this evidence breaks down. The fact that this borrowing extends as low as 3, and may even go still lower for all we know, is a reason for using the argument from connected numerals cautiously, as tending rather to prove intercourse than kinship.
At the other end of the scale of civilization, the adoption
