THE RELATIONS OF SPEECH TO 

 HUMAN PROGRESS 



By LOUIS ROBINSON, M.D. 



While we are of course quite sure that human speech once 

 had a beginning it is very difficult to guess what that beginning 

 was. We often get some indication of evolutionary history by 

 observing the development of the embryo ; but when we study 

 the processes of vocal expression in human beings this method 

 is of very little use, because the imitative faculty seems to 

 account for most such manifestations of mental working in 

 young children. 



Did speech originally begin as a mere development of those 

 stereotyped noises which practically take its place amongst most 

 of the lower animals ? Or did our ancestors have the capacity 

 which we observe in so many birds, and in the young of our 

 own species, of mimicking other sounds by the voice? In this 

 direction we appear to get no aid from the study of our nearest 

 relatives in the animal world. In a state of semi-domestication 

 they appear ready to imitate our actions in some particulars, 

 but as far as I have been able to learn this does not extend 

 to vocal efforts at all. Indeed the anthropoids best known to 

 us appear to be curiously silent beings whose vocal activity 

 is very much less than that of many creatures far behind them 

 in intelligence. One would think that creatures with such large 

 and versatile brains as the chimpanzee and the other great 

 apes, must have, in their natural state, some habitual method 

 of intercommunication corresponding in some degree to their 

 mental development. If this be so naturalists have altogether 

 failed to discover it. 



This inarticulateness certainly is an argument, when we 

 consider what a vociferous being is man, against our near 

 kinship with the great anthropoids. It is said, however, that 

 among those humbler manlike apes, the gibbons, which in many 

 ways seem so far removed from us, there is a far greater use 

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