522 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



operations, and hunting by co-operative measures took the 

 place of a solitary search for such vegetable nutriment as 

 the forest afforded, it is plain that a power to express plainly 

 what part each hunter was to play would be most essential. It 

 should be remembered that man must have been for a long time 

 an amateur, a mere blundering novice, rather than a finished 

 professional, as are all the true beasts of prey. A pack of dogs 

 or wolves manage to co-operate and follow the hints of the 

 leaders with extraordinary success ; but then they have been 

 bred to the trade for innumerable generations, and their instincts 

 sharpened in this particular to an extraordinary degree. Early 

 man had to find some short cut in attaining the results which 

 the carnivora attained as a result of an apprenticeship through 

 whole epochs of time. His brain was amply sufficient, in all 

 probability, for the task, but it was needful to find a method 

 by which schemes and artifices springing from that already 

 active brain could be communicated with accuracy to his 

 partners in the enterprise. Here I do not think that any 

 elaboration of those natural animal noises, which came to him, 

 like his physical attributes, ready-made from a more brutish 

 generation, would have gone far. But if he possessed a very 

 little of the mimicking faculty and a fair vocal range, the 

 beginnings of human speech become possible. As a matter 

 of fact all languages give proof of the large use made of sounds 

 which were originally the mimicking of the voices of nature. 



The question as to the possible remnants still existing in 

 our elaborate methods of speech of the original sounds and 

 cries belonging to a pre-human existence is an intensely 

 interesting one. That they still persist in some degree is fairly 

 obvious in the form of certain semi-articulate exclamations 

 common to practically all the peoples of the earth. What 

 used to be known in our grammar books as Interjections are 

 probably their fossil remnants, more or less modified by the 

 pressure of superincumbent ages. The w r riter paid a good deal 

 of attention to this subject some years ago when investigating 

 the ancestral traits in very young children. Of course the 

 " crowing " and scolding cries in young infants are of this 

 character, as also are many of the "o" sounds of later life 

 indicating distress, wonder, or surprise. 



A complete catalogue of such vestigial pre-human parts of 

 speech cannot be attempted here, but the subject is a very 



