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—regards action as better than words for telling simple story. The 
Cisterian monks still use it exclusively. The Italian pantomimists 
skilfully expressed meaning by gesture, and it is extensively used by 
the Indian interpreters among the various tribes who habitually 
employ gestures, stress and tone as essential aids to vocal utterance. 
With us to-day grimace and gesture survive merely as an adjunct to 
oral language in the actor and orator. Picture writing also is still re- 
presented by the arrow and the index hand indications of fight or 
direction,in the full moons and half moons of our almanacs,the ideogram 
in the rebus, and hieroglyphical symbols on printers’ proofs and medical 
prescriptions. Colonel Garrick Mallery’s fine work on “ The Pictographs 
of the American Indians,” shews that they are great adepts at picture- 
writing, for the chiefs kept their census by it, counting heads and 
recording names in a very methodical manner. 
** Language most shews a man,— 
Speak that 1 may see.” 
wrote Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s most appreciative contemporary, and 
some modern philosophers still hold with Aristotle that the possession 
of articulate speech is the sole distinction between men and other 
animals, many of which communicate with each other by inarticulate- 
cries, tones, and gestures, having thus an intelligible language of their 
own, which man has not wholly mastered. No one would deny the 
vocal powers of birds ; indeed, we compliment a human singer by com- 
parison witha nightingale. The vocal organs of a magpie or parrot are 
so highly developed that articulate language is imitated to such per- 
fection that the phrase “ He speaks like a parrot” has become part of 
our language, and is used alike of a schoolboy or politician who repeats 
words without realising their meaning. But the bird’s powers stop 
there. He imitates words and extends their meaning by association, 
but does not originate. In some respects the voice organs of birds are 
more highly developed than those of the mammalia. Modern ornitho- 
logists class the singing birds highest. The vocal organs are alike in 
the nightingale, which pours forth exquisite melody, and the crow, 
which never rises beyond that conversational “caw, caw,” whence its 
name of “ Krakra” was alike derived in the ancient language of India, 
and that of “ Kahkah” in British Columbia. The production of in- 
articulate cries, tone, and resonance is also characteristic of the 
mammalia as a class, and there is a certain progressive organic develop- 
ment and specialised modification to produce the bray of the ass, the 
roar of the lion, the purr of the cat,and soon. Among birds additional 
air sacs for the increase of the volume of sound are frequently 
enormously developed, and in those American monkeys which give 
utterance to such fearful cries as to fully merit their name of ‘“‘ Howlers.” 
An African species, the cynocephalus, or dog-faced monkey, figured on 
ancient Egyptian monuments, utters sounds which sometimes contain a 
distinct consonantal D, and clicks resembling the inarticulate clicks in 
the speech of the Hottentots and Bushmen. Of animals nearer to man 
we may cite the gibbon, which Professor Owen says almost sings in 
semitones and hasa range of an octave. But man alone combines the 
simple sounds of consonants with vowels into complex sounds or 
yllables, thus forming word-signs to convey to another the impressions 
