The Number Concept

A crow watches men enter a watch-house—and notices when too few come out. Is it counting, or only sensing that something has changed?

In The Number Concept, late-19th-century mathematician Levi L. Conant follows a question back toward the earliest human ways of making number visible. Some languages, he notes, have scarcely any numeral words; yet people find ways to distinguish one from many, and children reach instinctively for their fingers. From finger-counting to pebbles, notches and knots, Conant traces the practical devices that precede number words, while asking whether animals, too, have a sense of number. If the origin of number itself lies beyond proof, what can these humble counters still reveal?

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