Many eminent men have thought, and still think, that man has always possessed articulate speech, nay, even grammatical forms. The legend of Adam giving names to all cattle has contributed to keep alive this convenient but undemonstrable theory. It may be said at once, that other and not less weighty authorities have always regarded language as a conquest won by man, and that the studies of modern philologists have definitely established these ancient guesses.

The wide-spread faith in the divine origin of language is one of the arguments alleged or accepted by the partisans of the former theory. To begin with, it is worth neither more nor less than the pretended universal consent, so dear to hard-pressed deists and devout persons. We should leave it on one side without insisting further, but that it springs from a confusion of ideas on which it is well to throw some light.

The ancients commonly attributed the invention and the gift of language to some special or national god, Thoth or Jahveh-that is to say, to superhuman men framed in their own image, and possessed, like themselves, of mouth and throat-a childish theory which corresponded to their mental condition. It offered no explanation; rather it solved the question in the sense of a chance acquisition of the powers of speech. And in truth the ancients were convinced that many centuries had elapsed before language was known. Some one had invented it, as Vulcan the art of working in metal, or Triptolemus agriculture; and the inventor was, like his fellows, a god. That was the point of view of the polytheist; that of the modern metaphysician is different. As by the slow process of elimination and absorption, the crowd of supernatural beings was

gradually reduced to unity, the particular virtues of the different gods were concentrated in the God of Monotheism, and finally in the vague God of the deists, without parts or organs. This inconsistent being has inherited the attributes of Tlaloc, of the Cabiri, and the rest. He alone sways, as best he may, the unnumbered thunderbolts whose caprices taxed in earlier days the powers of all the gods of Olympus. Among other functions, he has retained the distribution of all the evil and all the good, of which the source remains unknown. Briefly, it is he whom men invoke or evoke when all other explanations fail. The writers of 1830, poets, novelists, and historians, vie with each other in summoning this deus ex machina. Even men of science intrench themselves behind his inscrutable designs. Is it necessary to state that we merely confess our ignorance every time that we have recourse to the deity to explain any fact? The dictum that God gave to man breath, memory, speech, is a meaningless phrase.

There are those who, while they do not admit it, yet see the inanity of such an assertion; but they return to it by another road. "No need," say they, "to invoke the supernatural; nature is all-sufficient; nature gave language to man." If nature be, in this connection, simply an equivalent for the deity, the question is no nearer a solution. Fortunately a term so indefinite is open to various interpretations; we need not quarrel with it if it means the natural origin of language. From the moment that the word nature connotes the sum of things and their relations to each other, it no longer brings us up against the dead wall of creation ex nihilo. Nature in this sense lends herself to the research and the inductions of science. fore admit the harmless truism that

We may therenature in man

implies the expression of thought by means of speech. Such was the opinion of Epicurus, brilliantly expounded by Lucretius. But neither these philosophers nor any ancient writer, except the compiler of the Book of Genesis, supposed that language was a sudden revelation; that man was at once endowed by nature with the noun substantive, or even with the separate syllables which enter into the composition of words. Their gradual evolution is dependent on the slow develop- X ment of the cerebral and vocal instruments of social habits.

Diodorus Siculus, a compiler of mediocre intelligence, and Vitruvius, another author of the second rank, have stated this simple conclusion in terms which Schleicher and Whitney would not disavow.

"The voice of man," said Diodorus, "being at first confused and meaningless, he succeeded at length in framing a general system of designations common to all, by the constant endeavour to pronounce words articulately, and by agreeing together on vocal signs applied to each object. But as similar centres of organisation arose in all parts of the earth, the result was that absence of uniformity which gave rise to the diversity of tongues" (Hist. i. 8). This passage, of which every word should be remembered, is supplemented by these words of Schleicher: "Language, which even during the short period of history has been subject to perpetual flux and change, is the product of a slow evolution. . . Moreover, from the moment that we recognise in the physical constitution of man the principle of his speech, we are bound to admit that the development of language has accompanied, step by step, the development of the brain and of the organs of speech. But if it be language which makes man,

our first ancestors were not what we understand by man. . . . Thus the study of language conducts us | unmistakably to the hypothesis of the gradual evolution of man from lower forms."

The ancients, intuitive adherents of the theory of evolution, here meet modern men of science. More than once they allude to the day when man had not the gift of speech,-mutum et turpe pecus," a dumb and servile flock," says Horace, "until the day when words. noted sounds and impressions." "Utility," as Lucretius clearly understood, "called forth the names of things," expressit nomina rerum. What need of words had the anthropoid of Neanderthal or of La Naulette, when, alone and naked, in the thick atmosphere or on marshy soil, flint in hand, he wandered from thicket to thicket, seeking some edible plant or berry, or following the traces of some female as savage as himself. Act followed impulse as though mechanically, and was accompanied by cry or gesture, joyous or plaintive. Constant fear, wonder, desire, hunger, and thirst; everything that is most crude, most instinctive, least the result of reflection; fleeting curiosity; the vague and fugitive impression of some unexpected sensation; memory at times tenacious, but extremely limited; senses young and unpractised; brain smooth and with few divisions, incapable of analysis-nothing here suggests the use of fixed and numerous symbols. Before man could give names to things, he must have observed them, distinguished them; nay, more, there must have been the need and the opportunity of communicating his observations and discoveries; the germ, however rudimentary, of the family, of a society, of a public whose interest it was to understand the utterances of its members, and to join together in a common

undertaking. Afterwards long habit and constant effort were needed to retain and apply, to co-ordinate and multiply the vocal utterances which, to begin with, were uncertain and variable. Diodorus clearly-perceived this; and Vitruvius, who connects the origin of language with the discovery of fire, with the social influences of the hearth, shows us a company of men endeavouring by means of cries and gestures to communicate to each other their admiration. "They uttered,” he says, "various sounds and shaped words by chance; then, using frequently the same sounds to indicate certain things, they began to speak to each other." Such are those African savages who fail to understand each other at night, and whose imperfect speech requires the aid of gesture.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of this probability is the universal admiration which hailed the invention, or rather the acquisition of language; the faith in litanies and formulas; the magic power attributed to the spoken word, the revealer, almost the creator of the world; the divine honours rendered to the personified Hymn, to poetry, to the Logos, to Brahma and the Word; the inevitable confusion between light and language, between speech and reason.

The study of the elements of speech lends its support to arguments drawn from sociology and such general considerations. We are not yet concerned with syllables, so variously combined in the thousands of idioms spoken all over the face of the earth. In their earliest form they do but take us back to the beginnings of those tongues, dead or living, which we now know of, which were built up from the fragments of other dialects now for ever vanished. The study of sounds goes yet farther back towards the source of language; it deals