158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that can overbear his own. One thing I am certain about: namely, 

 that neither MuUer nor Steinthal has answered me. As Mr. Muller 

 appreciates so fully the danger in which I am placed, I wonder that 

 he is not willing to put forth a hand to save me from it. I have with 

 these gentlemen, so far as concerns my side, only a scientific contro- 

 versy, sustaining my view of language against their contrary (and 

 mutually conflicting) opinions. If I have been over- warm in assault, 

 that is my disadvantage as well as my fault, as I thereby lay myself 

 the more open to a counter-attack, having no right to claim to be 

 treated more gently. But I have a right to protest against the con- 

 troversy being made a personal instead of a scientific one ; against 

 being met with the plea that I am too disrespectful to the magnates of 

 science for my arguments to deserve attention. Such a reply is gener- 

 ally, and justly, regarded as equivalent to a confession of weakness. 



It has, perhaps, been my misfortune not to appreciate sufliciently 

 the services rendered by Prof. Muller to the science of language; cer- 

 tainly, while fully acknowledging what he has done toward spreading 

 a degree of knowledge of its facts, and, by \\\^ prestige and eloquence, 

 attracting to them the attention of many who might have been reached 

 in no other way, I might have been able to see that he helped either 

 to broaden its foundations or to strengthen its superstructure. In 

 ways and for reasons which I have sufficiently detailed in other places, 

 his views have seemed to me wanting in solidity of basis, and in con- 

 sistency and logical coherence. The difference between us is by no 

 means of that slight character which, in his article, he gives it the air 

 of being " a slight matter of terminology," and the like ; it reaches 

 to the bottom. Holding as I do, I cannot expect that his proposed 

 work on " Language as the True Barrier between Man and Beast," 

 whatever its general interest and readableness, will be a contribution 

 of serious importance to the discussion of the subject. Nor, indeed, 

 that, by any one, more can be made of this barrier than has been made 

 of the various others, which a profounder zoological and anthropologi- 

 cal science has thrown down, claiming that no impassable barrier, but 

 only an impracticable distance, separates the two and separates them 

 just as effectively. If my view of the nature of language is the true 

 one, the absence of speech in the lower animals is easily seen to be 

 correlated with many other deficiencies incident to their inferiority of 

 endowment; they have no civilization, no "institutions" of any kind; 

 nothing that goes down by tradition, is taught and learned. Their 

 means of communication is almost wholly intuitive, not arbitrary and 

 conventional, which are the most essential and highest attributes of 

 ours. I say " almost," because I think the want not absolute ; the 

 rudiments of speech are just as much present in animals as, for ex- 

 ample, those of the use of instruments ; on account of which latter, 

 Mr. Muller pronounces the " use of tools " no barrier. 



Human language began when sign-making by instinct became sign- 



