tin _mille_, and really means "great thousand."
The Dakota[124] language shows the same origin for its expression of
1,000,000, which is _kick ta opong wa tunkah_, great 1000. The origin of
such terms can hardly be ascribed to poverty of language. It is found,
rather, in the mental association of the larger with the smaller unit, and
the consequent repetition of the name of the smaller. Any unit, whether it
be a single thing, a dozen, a score, a hundred, a thousand, or any other
unit, is, whenever used, a single and complete group; and where the
relation between them is sufficiently close, as in our "gross" and "great
gross," this form of nomenclature is natural enough to render it a matter
of some surprise that it has not been employed more frequently. An old
English nursery rhyme makes use of this association, only in a manner
precisely the reverse of that which appears now and then in numeral terms.
In the latter case the process is always one of enlargement, and the
associative word is "great." In the following rhyme, constructed by the
mature for the amusement of the childish mind, the process is one of
diminution, and the associative word is "little":

One's none,
Two's some,
Three's a many,
Four's a penny,
Five's a little hundred.[125]

Any real numeral formation by the use of "little," with the name of some
higher unit, would, of course, be impossible. The numeral scale must be
complete before the nursery rhyme can be manufactured.

It is not to be supposed from the observations that have been made on the
formation of savage numeral scales that all, or even the majority of
tribes, proceed in the awkward and faltering manner indicated by many of
the examples quoted. Some of the North American Indian tribes have numeral
scales which are, as far as they go, as regular and almost as simple as our
own. But where digital numeration is extensively resorted to, the
expressions for higher numbers are likely to become complex, and to act as
a real bar to the extension of the system. The same thing is true, to an
even greater degree, of tribes whose number sense is so defective that they
begin almost from the outset to use combinations. 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 i