  Crummell does not think he is being prejudicial here, despite the extreme linguistic bias any modern-day reader would take him to be displaying. He relies on John L. Wilson's description of Grebo—something of a standard ethnography of his day—and so to a great extent is engaging in a positivistic rather than impressionistic account of Grebo. Of course, any present-day language study would rely on descriptions systematically developed from the judgments of native speakers rather than non-native observations. And his positivism has its theoretical basis in arguments familiar from John Locke's philosophy of language. Words are the names of thoughts, and so articulations in language are in effect mnemonic devices for thinking. His regard for reason would certainly lead him to emphasize a priori concepts, but the theoretical assumptions are largely due to Locke.