590 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



expression of some dogs when beating up prey in a brake 

 cover is as appropriate psychologically as is the rather low 

 warbling or prattling set of notes given forth when two or 

 three are at play. Even more striking, varied, and appropri- 

 ate are the sounds given forth by some species of monkey, 

 when one watches them for a few hours, but all of which seem 

 in harmony with the psychologic state of the animals at the 

 time. 



Waitz (187: I, 272), Max Mliller and others have suggested 

 that "the unit of language is not the word but the sentence." 

 We would regard alike this and Romanes' conclusion there- 

 from "that historically the sentence precedes the word" as 

 being unwarranted by all the facts kno^n to us. Many sub- 

 stantives could well be represented by a gesture of the hand, 

 and such when united to one simple root verb would form an 

 expressive sentence. We would therefore conclude that 

 primitive man developed a root-verb articulative language, 

 along with a substantive gesture language. Partial evidence 

 in favor of this is the fact that Sumerian and other primitive 

 written languages have the substantive itself pictorially repre- 

 sented, and this, gradually simplified, became in time the 

 written sign-word for the article itself. 



But it may here be objected that while vocal or sound ex- 

 pressions, such as "rumble" for thunder-sounds, like "crackle" 

 for wood-fire noise, and other like words could readily be ex- 

 plained, this could not be done, or done at least easily and 

 naturally, for hand-arm action. A little reflection and investi- 

 gation, however, will show that this, instead of being an objec- 

 tion, is favored by all we know of many words and their hand- 

 arm connection. 



Thus if we think of the early cave man of France and his 

 pictorial representation of animal life on a mammoth tusk, the 

 word "scratch" could well signify his hand-arm action, and 

 the brain response to it. So after he had laboriously used a 

 hand shell or stone splinter perhaps, to etch out an animal 

 form on the tusk, when he again wandered with a companion 

 and alit on some etching object that would be suited to the 



