578 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



standpoints here briefly outlined. All that a conservative student will 

 care to do is to shrug his shoulders and to say, ''Thus far we can go 

 and no farther." It should be said, however, that more intensive 

 study of linguistic data is from time to time connecting stocks that 

 had hitherto been looked upon as unrelated. Yet it can hardly be 

 expected that serious research will ever succeed in reducing the 

 present Babel to a pristine unity. 



Although we can not demonstrate a genetic unity of all forms of 

 human speech, it is interesting to observe that there are several funda- 

 mental traits that all languages have in common. Perhaps these 

 fundamental similarities are worthy of greater attention than they 

 generally receive and may be thought by many to possess a high 

 degree of significance. First of all, we find that in every known lan- 

 guage use is made of exactly the same organic apparatus for the pro- 

 duction of speech, that is, the glottal passage in the larynx, the nasal 

 passages, the tongue, the hard and soft palate, the teeth and the lips. 

 The fact that we are accustomed to consider all speech as self-evidently 

 dependent on these organs should not blind us to the importance of 

 the association. There is, after all, no a priori reason why the com- 

 munication of ideas should be primarily through sound symbols pro- 

 duced by the apparatus just defined; it is conceivable that a S3^stem 

 of sound symbols of noises produced by the hands and feet might 

 have been developed for the same purpose. As a matter of fact, there 

 are many systems of thought transference or language in the widest 

 sense of the word, as a moment's thought "wdll show, that are inde- 

 pendent of the use of the ordinary speech apparatus. The use of 

 writing will occur to every one as the most striking example among 

 ourselves. Among primitive peoples we may instance, to cite only a 

 couple of examples of such subsidiary forms of language, the gesture 

 language of the Plains Indians of North America and the very highly 

 developed drum language of several African tribes. From our present 

 point of view it is significant to note that these and other such non- 

 spoken languages are either, as in the case of practically all systems 

 of writing, themselves more or less dependent on a phonetic system, 

 that is, speech in the ordinary sense of the word, or else are merely 

 auxiliary systems intended to replace speech only under very special 

 circumstances. The fact then remains that the primary and universal 

 method of thought transference among human beings is via a special 

 articulating set of organs. Much loose talk has been expended by 

 certain ethnologists on the relatively important place that gesture 

 occupies in the languages of primitive peoples, and it has even been 

 asserted that several so-called primitive languages are unintelligible 

 without the use of gesture. The truth, however, is doubtless that 

 the use of gesture is associated not with primitiveness, but rather with 

 temperament. The Russian Jew and the Italian, for instance, non- 



