THE    WITNESS  OF  PHILOLOGY.  353

Standing  that  the  latter  may  all  be  most  nearly  related
together,  and  severally  named  by  as  many  denotative
signs  :  even  with  their  numberless  already-formed  words
for  different  kinds  of  trees,  the  aborigines  of  Tasmania
could  not  designate  "a  tree."  Of  course  they  must  have
had  a  recept  of  a  tree,  or  a  generic  image  formed  out  of
innumerable  perceptions  of  particular  trees — so  that,  for
instance,  it  would  doubtless  have  surprised  a  Tasmanian
could  he  have  seen  a  tree  (even  though  it  were  a  new
species  for  which  he  had  no  name)  standing  inverted
with  its  roots  in  the  air  and  its  branches  in  the  ground.
In  just  the  same  way  a  dog  is  surprised  when  it  first
sees  a  man  walking  on  his  hands  :  the  dog  will  bark  at
such  an  object  because  it  conflicts  with  the  generic  image
which  has  been  automatically  formed  by  numberless  percep-
tions of  individual  men  walking  on  their  feet.  But,  in  the
absence  of  any  name  for  trees  in  general,  there  is  nothing
to  show  that  the  savage  has  a  concept  answering  to  "  tree,"
any  more  than  that  the  dog  has  a  concept  answering  to  "  man."
Indeed,  unless  my  opponents  vacate  the  basis  of  Nominalism
on  which  their  opposition  is  founded,  they  must  acknowledge
that  in  the  absence  of  any  name  for  tree  there  can  be  no
conception  of  tree.
So  much,  then,  for  what  Archdeacon  Farrar  has  called
« the  hopeless  poverty  of  the  power  of  abstraction  "  in  savages.
