Physical Evolution of Man 591 



purpose, a hand-gesture with the new found object held ap- 

 propriately in it, and the emission of the single sound "scratch," 

 would be equivalent to saying '*! have found a good shell for 

 use in scratching figures on my mammoth tusk." 



Again the verb "hew" doubtless has a primitive and apt 

 sound-significance. For many laborers, when cutting down a 

 tree or driving a wedge between stone blocks, habitually utter 

 with each blow a semi-guttural sound that phonetically might 

 be put as a "heougli." The word "weave" could well signify 

 the softly sliding noise of the shuttle as it slid through the fibers 

 of a cloth from hand to hand. Smear, scatter, tear, pour, and 

 many other of the above cited verbs may well have originated 

 as sound words that the hand-arm called forth when in contact 

 with and using soft fats, hard grains or pebbles, shredding 

 leaves of palms, or in pouring out water or oil respectively. 



The comparatively rapid origin of spoken language amongst 

 men seems to have been due to a corresponding rapid develop- 

 ment of the hand as a plastic environal contact-organ that 

 rapidly and delicately brought the brain into cognito-cogitic 

 relation with that environment, and so enabled it to proenviron 

 a plan of response that, when put in action, constituted a suf- 

 ficient or satisfied response. Further we would exactly follow 

 J. Loeb (60 passim) in considering that all of this involves 

 fundamentally a series of continuous changes in definite colloid 

 molecules due to lines of energy that temporarily act on and 

 alter them. Therefore also the supposedly scathing, but 

 truly superficial, criticism of a recent writer (1S9: 603d), when 

 trying to follow Loeb's results, seems to us as smug and unscien- 

 tific as his knowledge evidently of scientific facts is scant. We 

 can never reach an intelligent psychology till we understand 

 protoplasm, nor understand protoplasm till we have grappled 

 physico-chemically with colloids. 



But the above origin of language postulates, as a fundamental 

 condition, that primitive man lived in communities or colonies, 

 and hereditarily derived his social instincts from the anthro- 

 poid apes. Some writers, influenced possibly by the semi- 

 solitary or at most restricted social life of the gorilla and orang, 



