THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 99 



person who is speaking to them, in order to get the exact sense of the 

 words which they hear. 



We mention here, without dwelling upon it, that the faculty of 

 language stands in close relation with a certain one of the frontal con- 

 volutions of the brain, which the inferior monkeys do not possess and 

 which is found in a rudimentary state in the anthropoids, but the full 

 acquisition and most complete development of which have made man, 

 what he is, the master of articulate speech. 



We thus perceive that the study of language belongs to the domain 

 of the natural sciences. The objections that have been made to this 

 view have little force with us. The first of them is that language is 

 not transmitted with the blood. This confounds the transmission of 

 the art of speech with that of the faculty of language. The faculty is 

 hereditarily transmitted ; it is intimately related to the cerebral devel- 

 opment, and goes down with the structure, nature^ and qualities of the 

 brain. As to the way in which the transmitted organ shall perform its 

 functions, the parents of the child are there to stimulate and direct it, 

 and to teach their offspring how to use the faculty it has inherited 

 from them. We must not confound the faculty with the use that may 

 be made of it. That use is an art, which the child acquires by tradi- 

 tion. But, we repeat, in the period of formation of a language, sono- 

 rous expression is only the more intense formulation of an emotion, 

 usually associated with mimicry, the general attitude and face-play, 

 a formulation which has the advantage of being more striking to 

 strangers. In any case, it originally required to be complemented by 

 gesture ; and peoples little advanced in civilization may still be cited, 

 among whom conversation is difficult in the dark, where mimicry can 

 not be brought in to aid it. Bon wick relates that the Tasmanians had 

 to recur to gestures and signs to establish the exact sense of their 

 words ; and Spix and Martins say the same of some of the savages of 

 South America, and Cranz of the Greenlanders. These observations 

 are far from being the only ones that have been made to the same 

 effect. 



A sound reason for including the study of language among the 

 natural sciences lies in the fact that no man or group of men is com- 

 petent arbitrarily to change the structure of its language. Fashion 

 may sometimes admit particular words or banish others, but that has 

 nothing to do with the structure. The morphological evolution of 

 language defies all convention, all encroachment ; it goes on by virtue 

 of its own force, more or less slowly or speedily, but without the fancy 

 or the pleasure of men having any power to divert it from its course. 

 In short, we must avoid confounding changes in the vocabulary with 

 linguistic, or, as we might call them, morphological changes. Among 

 some Polynesian peoples, words are sometimes abolished ; they will 

 cease, for example, to employ in conversation the syllables that occur 

 in the name of a chief ; some people of the Bantu race will not pro- 



