The ancient world associated number magically with the properties of physical things, and with the necessary causes of things, much as science has tended until recent times to reduce all objects to numerical quantities. In any and all of its manifestations, however, number seems to have both auditory and repetitive resonance, and a tactile dimension as well. It is the quality of number that explains its power to create the effect of an icon or an inclusive compressed image. Such is its use in newspaper and magazine reporting, as: "Cyclist John Jameson, 12, Collides with Bus," or "William Samson, 51, New Vice-President in Charge of Brooms." By rule of thumb the journalists have discovered the iconic power of number. Since Henri Bergson and the Bauhaus group of artists, to say nothing of Jung and Freud, the nonliterate and even antiliterate values of tribal man have in general received enthusiastic study and promotion. For many European artists and intellectuals, jazz became one of the rallying points in their quest for the integral Romantic Image. The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place." Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures. Take 36-24-36. Numbers cannot become more sensuously tactile than when mumbled as the