1899] BIOLOGICAL ANALOGY & SPEECH-DEVELOPMENT 49 



the perceived relations of emotions and ideas with other emotions and 

 ideas. The very articulation of sounds, as Professor Paul admirably 

 and clearly points out, is due to certain psychological processes. Thus 

 each division of language depends upon mental states, and the sounds 

 themselves which body these forth are the direct results of organic 

 movements. It becomes clear then that speech, like other habits, and 

 perhaps in a more subtle and complex manner than any other habit, is 

 learnt in the beginning by imitation, and is modified and moulded by 

 each individual in the mint of his mental and bodily personality. 

 According to this view, therefore, the factor which makes for conserva- 

 tion of speech type is the necessity for intelligibility : that which 

 makes for variation is divergency of temperament, psychological and 

 physiological, among the speakers. But although the dominating func- 

 tion of these two factors is respectively change, and a hindering of 

 change, they each contain the potentialities of the converse. For, since 

 there is undoubtedly an objective tendency on the part of a community 

 as a whole to slowly change their speech in the same direction, it is 

 clear that a wilful conservatism on the part of the individual would defeat 

 his object of being intelligible to his fellows. So, again, the tendency 

 of the individual to vary in habits of body and mind will have a limit 

 set to it by conditions of life, of climate, of race, of education, of ideals, 

 and of morals, which he will undergo in common with the other 

 members of the society to which he and they belong. 



It is these cross currents of tendency which complicate the whole 

 problem of the evolution of speech, and make it difficult to state the 

 question with clearness and completeness. Still, these difficulties must 

 some day be met, and it cannot be denied that so far nobody has made 

 an adequate attempt to meet them. It were devoutly to be wished 

 that some scholar of sufficient courage and learning would rend the 

 veil, and light up the darkness beyond. The archives of the Science of 

 Language are at this moment like a magnificent collection of stuffed 

 animals and carefully-preserved beetles, most of them indeed roughly 

 classified and ticketed. "We contemplate them with no little enthusiasm, 

 we have numbered the hairs on the heads of many of the larger 

 mammals, have gathered the dust from the wings of the butterflies ; 

 but if you ask us whence they came, or question us as to their life, 

 their growth, and death, we cannot tell. Like the learned ancients who 

 beheld the flies in amber, " we wonder how the devil they got there " ; 

 in fact, our philosophy of origins is that of Topsy. In the meantime 

 philologists must watch and pray for the coming of their Darwin and 

 their Weismann. 



Corpus Cheisti College, Oxford. 



4 — NAT. SC. VOL. XIV. NO. 83. 



